Available: Riptide Publishing
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: 20% of all proceeds from this title are donated
to the Ali Forney Center in New York, whose mission “is to protect lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning (LGBTQ) youth from the harm of
homelessness, and to support them in becoming safe and independent as they move
from adolescence to adulthood.” To learn more about this charity or to donate
directly, please visit www.aliforneycenter.org.
Blurb:
Sometimes the
best thing you can get for Christmas is knowing what you really want
Rusty Baker is a
blond, rich, entitled football player in a high school full of them—just the
type of oblivious jock all the bullied kids hate. And he might have stayed that
way, except he develops a friendship with out-and-proud Oliver Campbell from
the wrong side of the tracks. Rusty thinks the friendship is just pity—Oliver
is very bright, and Rusty is very not—but then Oliver kisses him goodbye when
Rusty leaves for college, and Rusty is forced to rethink everything he knows
about himself.
But even Rusty’s
newfound awareness can’t help him survive a semester at Berkeley. He returns
home for Thanksgiving break clinging to the one thing he knows to be true:
Oliver Campbell is the best thing that’s ever happened to him.
Rusty’s parents
disagree, and Rusty finds himself homeless for the holidays. Oliver may not
have much money, but he’s got something Rusty has never known: true family.
With their help and Oliver’s love, Rusty comes to realize that he may have
failed college, but he’ll pass real life with flying rainbow colors.
Excerpt:
Chapter One
The Home Pond
It was sort of a
shock. I mean, I was supposed to be coming home for Thanksgiving, not getting
kicked out of the house a month before Christmas. If I’d been mean about it, I
would have blamed Oliver, but I couldn’t. I mean . . . you can’t really blame
Oliver for anything. He’s just too damned nice.
In fact, that was why
we hung out together all through our senior year. I mean, I’d been hanging with
all those other jokers for my entire life. Kindergarten, grade school, middle
school—you could have thrown our jock genes in a blender and pretty much
swapped all our parts. We were interchangeable. White boys, blue/green eyes,
sandy blond/sandy brown hair, good bones, good nutrition, some sort of Teutonic
conspiracy to produce a football team in the nouveau riche suburbs of the
foothills—that was us. I mean, I had brown eyes and blond hair, and I was the
closest thing to an ethnic minority our high school had ever seen.
Until Oliver.
Oliver showed up in
early September of my senior year, slender, brown on brown on brown. Dark brown
hair cut with long bangs around his narrow face, dark brown eyes with thick,
thick lashes, and light brown skin. He slouched quietly in the back of Mr.
Rochester’s English Literature class and eyed the rest of us with sort of a
gentle amusement.
“Yo, Rusty,” Clayton
called to me as I took my seat by the new boy. “What’s the new guy?”
I looked at Clayton
blankly. He was one of those big white-blond kids with a face that ran to red
whenever he exerted himself. He was a defensive lineman on the football team,
and his father sold insurance. He was also a sadistic fuck who liked to haze
freshmen by slamming them against lockers and calling them names until they
cried. That shit had been sort of funny when we were sophomores, but my little
sister told me the last kid he’d done that to had needed to change schools and
see a shrink, and that’s sort of a horrible thing to do to a kid.
It suddenly occurred
to me that the dark kid slouching in the corner of the room was a prime target
for Clayton, but he was looking at us, all amused like he didn’t give a crap,
and that might have offered him a little protection right there.
I liked that. He
didn’t give a crap. The last girl I’d dated had been so excited about dating a
football player, she’d literally gone down on me before dinner, and, well, I’d
liked her, but I hadn’t been sure I wanted to know her that well. I’d also been
hungry. I’d sort of pulled her away from my crotch and asked her if we could go
eat steak. I think I hurt her feelings—she didn’t say much during dinner, and
she’d taken my kiss on the cheek like it was some sort of insult or something.
So this kid, smiling
at us friendly but not slobbering all over us or being afraid of us—that was
sort of nice.
I didn’t like Clayton
saying “What” in conjunction with those laughing brown eyes.
“What do you mean
‘what’?” I’m not that smart but I knew I probably wasn’t going to like that
answer either.
“I mean Indian, Mex,
darky, what?”
That snapped my head
back. My mother wasn’t the warmest person on the planet, but she was not pro on
us being rude like that.
“Where the hell were
you raised?” I snapped, appalled. “Jesus, he’s a kid. Leave him the hell
alone!”
Clayton rolled his
eyes at me. “Oh my God, Baker, could you be any more of a fairy princess?” That
was fine, though. He was so miffed at me, he’d forgotten about the kid, who was
watching our byplay like he was watching a tennis match.
“Do you see me in a
dress blowing you?” I asked, and the rest of the class chortled. Clayton turned
red(der) and glared at me as the teacher walked in. I leaned back in my seat
and gave the kid a reassuring grin.
“He should leave you
alone now,” I said quietly as Mr. Rochester pointed to the warm-up on the
board. “See that? That’s the page number. There’s a quick assignment we do in
our grammar books, and then we correct it.”
“Thanks,” the kid
said. “But you know, I’m gay. I’m not really big on the princess dress, but if
he wasn’t an asshole, I wouldn’t mind blowing him.”
And that was Oliver.
I sat there, my mouth
open, while the class got out their books and started the assignment. After
about a minute, the kid looked at me sideways, and finally I saw a waver of
uncertainty in him.
“You never met a fag
before?” he asked, and again, those painful manners that had been beaten into
my and my little sister’s hard heads—pretty much in the cradle—asserted
themselves.
“Nope,” I said
honestly, “but my mother wouldn’t let me use that word.” I wasn’t sure she’d
let a homosexual sit at our dinner table either, but then, that was my mother.
The kid looked at me
for a minute, considering. “Okay, if we keep that word off the table, could you
make sure I don’t get stuffed in a trash can during lunch?”
I grinned at him. “I
can do that. Can I copy what you got on the grammar warm-up? You scrambled my
tiny brain with the big, scary word.”
The boy laughed and
handed me his paper so I could copy super quick before Mr. Rochester could call
on me. That’s when I saw his name: Oliver Campbell, which wasn’t Hispanic or
Indian, but he didn’t look African American either.
I sat with him at
lunch that day, and a few of my friends sat with us. (Not Clayton—he had his
own squad of goons, and that was a relief.) My buddies harassed Oliver, don’t
get me wrong. Brian Halliday asked him if he got a thrill out of sitting with
all us football players, ’cause we were all buff. All Oliver had to do was look
him up and down once and say, “I may be gay, but I got better standards than
that,” and Brian was smirking and talking about cheerleaders. They kept at it,
but Oliver was great at rolling his eyes or saying something just as good, and
my buddies would start giving each other shit and leaving him alone.
It’s kind of sad when
I think about it now. At the time, I thought I hung out with a bunch of okay
kids. I figured we were spoiled and sheltered, but that wasn’t our fault,
really. I mean, I was proud because we sat down with someone new and different,
and didn’t beat him into the ground. Pathetic, really—that’s what I had to be proud
of, right? That my peer group didn’t bully people too badly? But it was
something to hold on to, even if it was something small. I needed any pride I
could find, because I knew college was coming along like a big steamroller to
cream me into the fucking pavement.
**~*~**
Now see, I know I’m
not that bright. I mean, give me time, and some hints, and an example, and
directions carved in rock, and I can power through almost anything.
Not like Oliver.
There’s a quickness to him.
When he walks, his
elbows come out from his sides in fluid, graceful little motions, and when he
talks, his hands dart around his face and shoulders like fish. He can tell
jokes, stupid ones but really funny, and rattle off the joke, and then the
punch line, and before I have a chance to laugh, surprised because he’s always
surprising, he’s on to the next joke.
“Hey, Rusty, why did
the chicken cross the road sllloooowwwlllly?”
“Why?”
“Because he doesn’t
believe in cars. Why did the squirrel haul ass across the road?”
“Heh heh . . . doesn’t
believe in . . . wait—why?”
“Because he does
believe in the ghost of chickens past.”
“Wait, is that because
the damned things are always getting killed on the—”
“What did the werewolf
say to the vampire on the night of the full moon?”
“I have no idea.”
“Things are about to
get hairy. What did the vampire say when he got the power vac?”
“Hairy! Hah! Uhm, I
dunno—”
“I vant to suck your
mud.”
And so on. We could
spend an entire lunch, and Oliver would be dropping one-liners like firecrackers
behind him, and the rest of us would be dancing in his wake. Most times, he
knew what the class assignment was going to be before Mr. Rochester finished
his usual joke about his own name.
“We’re going to find
the allegory in Jane Eyre, right?”
“Very good, Oliver.
How’d you guess?”
“’Cause no one names a
guy St. John unless they’re making a point about saints—especially if he’s the
guy who gets dumped for some guy whose name sounds like a rock.”
The whole class
laughed at that, me included, but I’d had to spend some time in the bathroom
the next morning, contemplating God, before I finished, flushed, and said,
“Wait. That St. John guy wasn’t real warm, and Mr. Rochester was really solid
and good . . . Is that what Oliver meant?”
So Oliver—hellsa
quick. Me—hellsa slow. He should have laughed at me, right? Written me off as a
dumb jock and gone and huddled with the coven of übergeeks who watched anime,
or the girls who read yaoi. But he didn’t. I guess because I’d been nice to him
when I hadn’t needed to be, he’d spent our entire senior year returning the
favor.
By the end of senior
year, after he’d helped me study for the SATs when my football friends were out
getting drunk, I was really fucking grateful.
I also felt bad,
because I sucked ass on the SATs. My scores were (and Oliver said this, and I’d
had to spend another morning in the bathroom to get it) toiletastic! I’d
applied to Berkeley and Stanford, because my grades were pretty good and my old
man made me, but it wasn’t until I saw the second round of SAT scores that I
realized just what a meatloaf I really was. I was so embarrassed, I couldn’t
look Oliver in the face for an entire day. I bailed on him during lunch, and
most other guys, they would have been hurt and bitchy and whined to their friends
about what a conceited asshole I was, but not Oliver.
“What the fuck is up
with you?”
He cornered me in the
locker room of all places, because I was taking PE sixth period for elective
credit like the dumb jock I was.
“What do you mean?” I
knew exactly what he meant, but I didn’t know what to say.
“You don’t email me
this weekend, you don’t talk to me today—c’mon, Rusty—I thought we were
friends.” His black eyebrows were drawn together over his eyes, and his mouth
was all pursed and pillowy. He looked cute, like a little kid, and I wanted to
hug him and tell him it was okay and make the tantrum go away.
I looked down at my
toes instead and clutched my towel tighter around my waist. I wasn’t afraid of
him checking me out—I’d been naked in front of girls before, and, well, I’d
stopped caring—but I felt naked inside too, and that was new.
“Nothing, I . . . you
know. You . . .” I had a lightbulb then—a truth I could tell him that would
mean he didn’t have to waste his time with me. “You have smart people to sit
with.” I looked up and met his eyes then and smiled, because I was proud of
that—it made me sound like an asshole, but it meant he didn’t have to waste his
time with me neither.
Something funny
happened to his face then. He squinched one eye and wrinkled his lip and sucked
air through his teeth. His front teeth were a little big, and his canines a
little crowded back—like he maybe could have had braces, but it wasn’t so bad
that he had to, so he didn’t. He opened his mouth to say something, and then
closed it, and then opened it again, and then he narrowed his eyes
suspiciously.
“Didn’t you get your
SATs back?”
Oh God. It was like
he’d read my mind. I looked at my toes again—I had really long toes, to match,
well, you know. Not to brag. “Uhm . . .”
“How bad?” he asked,
and his voice was absurdly gentle.
“I don’t wanna talk
about it,” I said, crossing my big toe over my middle toe. I could wiggle them
from that position too.
“That’s pretty bad.
What’d your dad say?” Because we both knew my dad had this vision: me in some
big college with a letterman’s jacket or something.
And this was the part
that really made my toes curl on the wet concrete. “He said he could pull
strings. Get me into Berkeley anyway. Told me I’d have to really study when I got
there, because this slacking shit wasn’t going to cut it.”
I was surprised when
his combat boots snuck into my field of vision and a hand came out and touched
me awkwardly on the shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Rusty.”
I shrugged away,
feeling worse than shit now, and ignored the shiver down my arm where Oliver
had touched me. “I don’t know why you’re sorry. You’re not the idiot who sucked
up all your time trying to learn to fuckin’ read and write. You’re the kid who
should be going to Berkeley, but you gotta go to junior college instead.” I
turned to my open locker and tucked my towel tight around my waist and started
to rip out my cargo shorts and tennis shoes and tank top so I could get dressed
and give him a ride home. He lived sort of far from my neighborhood—in fact,
I’m pretty sure he’d transferred to my school for the AP classes only—but the
house itself was cherry. It was small, but painted white, with red and pink
flowers growing up the white fence that surrounded the yard. From where I
usually sat in the car when I dropped him off, I could see four tiny dogs, who
always about lost their minds with pure joy that Oliver was home, and it was
getting so I could relate. Anyways, our pattern was for me to let Oliver off
outside the gate of his little house, and since I had the car, and it meant he
didn’t have to take the bus, I didn’t have a problem with that.
“Yeah,” Oliver agreed,
back here in the locker room. “Berkeley would be great. Ain’t gonna lie. But a
JC will give me a chance to get my skills up and running, and I’m damned
grateful. Rusty, you’re gonna get killed if you go there and you’re not ready.
Can’t they see that?”
I leaned my forehead
against my locker and swallowed, trying to breathe past the panic. “I’ll be
fine,” I lied. “You know me. Time and an instruction book, and I can conquer
the frickin’ world.”
“Yeah,” he said, but
he didn’t sound optimistic.
The week after that,
he asked me if I wanted to work for his dad that summer, part-time or
full-time, my choice. His dad was a contractor, and I’d get to do real simple
stuff—carry boards, push brooms, run water to the guys with nail guns and
screwdrivers who were framing houses or sanding drywall. It wasn’t a lot, but,
well, my other job prospect was pushing papers for my old man or someone else’s
old man (cause we were swapped around like action figures) in an office.
Guess which one
sounded better, right?
Not that the old man
saw it that way.
“Rusty, this job could
get you valuable contacts in whatever field you pursue—” Dad’s hair had gone
brown and gray, but I’ve seen pictures. It used to be blond like mine, streaked
by the sun, with undertones of red-brown. His cheeks used to be wreathed with
smiles too, but his mouth was a lot thinner now. I couldn’t remember seeing his
smile for a while.
“But Dad, this job
doesn’t need a suit.”
“Well, maybe you’re
old enough to actually think about your future instead of the next girl or the
next sunny day. Have you thought of that?”
I hadn’t had a
girlfriend since the girl who’d rather have had dick than dinner. It just
didn’t seem worth the trouble, really, explaining to them that they didn’t need
to put out. And getting some wasn’t as much fun as it used to be—but then,
having a friend at the movies had always seemed to be the best part of girlfriends
anyway. But, well, Dad had this vision of me, and football-jock-superbanger
seemed to be it.
“Dad,” I said, trying
to sound grown-up. “You know, maybe this . . . this thing you’ve got set up for
me in the future, maybe it’s not really a good fit. You ever think of that? I
mean, a college education, I get that, but maybe not Berkeley and the whole
nine yards—maybe a JC and some life experience, you think?”
“Russell, we’re not
screwing around here—this is your life. You go to a good college, you network,
you move on to graduate work. Why would you think that’s changed?”
I opened my mouth, a
lot like Oliver had, and closed it, and opened it again. “I . . . I mean, I’m
not great at school—you know, there’s tech schools and vocational schools all
over the place for guys who don’t, you know—”
“You are not
graduating from Western Career College,” my dad snapped, and I grinned and
tried to get the smile from him that I vaguely remembered from when I was a
kid.
“You can do it!” I
sang to the commercial, and apparently that was exactly the wrong thing to
sing, because Dad rolled his eyes and walked away.
So I tried Mom.
Now in some houses,
Mom would be the guaranteed win, right? “Oh, honey, of course. I understand
that you’re feeling out of your depth and you’d like to see if maybe something
a little less cerebral might be a better match for your much-vaunted future.”
Or, you know, at least “Yeah, go out and sweat in the sun, you’re eighteen, who
gives a shit?” right? But that wasn’t the way it was in my house. It wasn’t
like Mom was the guaranteed win; it was more like she was better at calculating
what was in it for her.
“What will you be
spending your money on?” she asked, narrowing her brown eyes at me as though
trying to figure the angle. I’d gotten her eyes, but there was something wrong
with mine. They were wider and nothing about me looked like I had anything to
do with angles. I was all about the curved muscle and brick walls.
I blinked. “I don’t
know. Clothes, the car—I mean, you guys pay for everything else. Maybe I’ll put
it in savings and see what I need.”
She nodded
consideringly. She worked part-time from home. She had a degree in finance, and
she did business for a day-trading firm. “That sounds prudent,” she said. “And
I think once you spend some time doing manual labor, it might lose its charm.”
As. If.
Best summer of my
life. Oh my God, give me simple tasks and a logical progression and I am a
happy boy. And you know what I figured out after, like, the first month? I
figured out that once I understood where I was and what I was doing, once I was
comfortable with things, I could think for myself.
On my third day, if
someone left a bucket of nails in the middle of the path I was walking, I
walked around it. On the sixth, I picked the bucket up and moved it out of the
way. The second week I was there, I found the guy with the nail gun and set it
next to him. During the third week, I checked to see if the bucket was full
enough, and if it wasn’t, I filled it. Then I asked the guy with the nail gun
if he could show me how to use it, and by the second month, I could spell the
guy with the nail gun, and then, when he came back to do his thing, I went and
asked the guy sanding the drywall exactly what the hell he was doing.
They thought I was a
frickin’ genius. It was awesome. After the first week, I was totally full-time.
And Oliver’s dad
couldn’t get enough of me. I loved that guy! When I moved the nail bucket, he
told me good job. By the time I was using the gun, he was telling me I was a
natural and asking my opinion and showing me how to use the equipment and shit.
He was great. I mean, my dad probably wouldn’t have thought much of him. He was
a short Latino guy, his black hair going iron gray, with beefy forearms and a
thick middle. He had a bushy mustache and faded tattoos on his sunburned brown
skin, but not a day went by without him asking me how I was doing and telling
me—hell, telling everyone on the site—what a good job we were doing, or asking
our opinion, or letting us know if we needed to hustle and why.
Oliver would come by
the site on his lunch hour—he was working at the library, and he seemed to love
the hell out of that—and brought us sandwiches and told us funny stories and
made sure we drank lots of water. I wanted soda, but Oliver, he told me that
shit was bad for me.
“Man, I know it, but
I’ve been drinking water all my life; I want something bad for me that doesn’t
give me a headache.” My mom didn’t let Estrella pack the good juice in our
lunches. It was all this high-end shit that tasted like crap but was good for
us.
Oliver studied me over
his turkey on dry wheat toast. “Well, if it doesn’t give you a headache, and it
makes you feel good, it’s good for you, right?”
I had a sudden thought
about his little oval face, and how just looking at it, with the bright and
shiny black eyes staring out at me—that was good for me.
“Yeah,” I said,
forgetting about food. “Yeah. Good for me.”
I don’t recall what he
said after that. I do remember talking him into going swimming at my house after
work, that’s what I remember doing, and after he laughed and agreed, and then
left for his job, his dad looked at me, head tilted to the side.
“I thought Oliver said
you weren’t that kind of friend,” he said quietly.
I looked at him
blankly. “What kind of friend?”
Arturo Campbell, whose
dad was white and whose mom was Venezuelan (I know this because he told me the
first day I met him, which was funny because I really wasn’t curious), shook
his head. “Kid, I think that’s gonna be the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question
for you, you know that?” And then, before I could embarrass us both by trying
to figure that out when we both knew I wasn’t capable of that shit, he took my
napkin and my water bottle from me. “Tomorrow, I’ll bring you a soda. Just one.
I think you’ve earned one lousy fucking soda.”
So Oliver came over to
my house that afternoon and swam, wet and agile as an otter, moving with the
same quick little motions with which he walked and spoke. My mom saw him and
smiled in greeting, and then walked away. My father walked in and out of the
house without acknowledging he was there. My sister was a freshman—she knew all
about Oliver. As we were swimming in the cool water under the oppressive heat
layer, she came out and asked him if he liked to shop. When he said no, he
liked to read, she blew a raspberry at him.
“What was that for?”
he asked, smiling that innocent white smile up at her. She was on the deck and
he was in the pool. I was in the deep end, treading water, hoping my little
sister wouldn’t be shitty to him so I wouldn’t have to act like a
three-year-old and call Mom to make her go away.
“That was for being
the wrong kind of gay. Jesus, what are stereotypes for?”
I snickered, because
she was sharp, and Oliver cracked up so hard he splashed water when his
otter-swift hands moved. “Well, mostly they’re to throw back in people’s
faces,” he said. “But I’ll go shopping in a bookstore, if that counts.”
Nicole stripped out of
her T-shirt and dropped it on the patio, wearing a plain old blue one-piece
because she was a little curvy and Mom said it was tasteful. Suddenly I sort of
yearned to see her in a paisley bikini; not because I’m a sick perv or
anything, but because Nicole was a lot more interesting than that plain blue
bathing suit and the plain white T-shirts that she always wore.
“Hmm . . .” she said,
thinking hard as she walked gingerly down the pool steps. It was hot enough
outside to make the cool sort of a shock. “Would it be the kind of place that
served cappuccino and had poetry readings and music nights?”
Oliver’s grin grew a
little dreamy. If you went up toward Placerville, there were arty little places
like that, but here? Nope. Everything was the big bland Costco of its stock.
Pottery Barn was considered unique and one of a kind, because God forbid
anything stand out or anything. I always figured that’s why people liked the
football team and the basketball team and the marching band so much: put
everyone in a uniform, and they all looked the same. I think in our community
that was reassuring.
So it didn’t take a
genius to figure that small, brown Oliver would be excited about a place not
populated by big hunks of clone meat like myself.
“If we get a place
like that up here, you let me know, okay?”
My sister laughed and
then dove into the water with a little shriek. When she surfaced, a few feet
from me, she said, “I think we’re going to have to build one, sweetheart—and
that means we’ll have to shop together after all.”
Oliver laughed and
conceded that maybe they would have to bond via retail. Whether she knew it or
not, my little sister—who had been a giant ugly bug crawling up my ass when I
had my football buddies over—was suddenly on our side.
Estrella came out then
with sandwiches and snacks, and I was surprised. She’d never done that when I’d
had my other friends over, although there had always been potato chips we could
serve.
I climbed out of the
pool and toweled my hair before coming over to check out the spread. “This is
awesome,” I told her, meaning it. She’d always been really nice to Nicole and
me, cooking our favorite stuff, smiling at us when we were eating dinner in the
kitchen, or asking us about our day. When we’d been younger, she’d been the
nanny, but as we’d gotten past needing one, Mom had kept her on as the
housekeeper/cook. I always thought it was because Mom loved her too, but that
was something else I think I got wrong. For Mom, she was just super competent
help. It was only to Nicole and me that Estrella meant something special.
“Well, I like this friend,”
Estrella said, smiling. She had little teeth, with a gap in the front, and a
round face and body. She was probably my mom’s age, but she seemed older
somehow—maybe it was the softness. I knew that she’d listened to Oliver and me
talk in the kitchen when we were studying for the SATs, and that she and Oliver
had sometimes had snow-flurry conversations in Spanish that had felt intimate
and real. She’d never spoken Spanish to me and Nicole. I felt like I knew her
better after she’d made us sandwiches and hot chocolate—and the snacks, by the
way, were pretty much one of the best things about the SATs, period.
“I know. I like him,
too. His dad is pretty awesome. I wish I could work for him forever.”
Estrella looked at me
thoughtfully. “I don’t think your father would like that very much,” she said
kindly, and I shrugged.
“Yeah, well, he might
change his mind when I flunk out of Berkeley.”
She sighed and patted
my hand, which was still wet from the pool. “Maybe you should think of a way to
avoid that?”
I winked at her to
make her smile. “You know me—anything to get out of hard work.”
Estrella shook her
head. “You’re a good boy, Rusty. Keep bringing Oliver by. He’s a good boy,
too.”
Nicole and Estrella
were smart—they saw the lines being drawn. But not my parents.
They treated Oliver
like they treated all of my other friends, and didn’t, not once, notice that
the enemy, the secret marauder who would topple all of their hopes and their
plans for their baby boy, was in their swimming pool, smiling up at me with
bright brown eyes, wearing a pair of plaid shorts that weren’t made for
swimming at all.
**~*~**
He came over to swim a
lot that summer. I remember little photo shoots in my head, his thin, brown
limbs shiny and wet as he stood on our white concrete patio. I liked the way he
flipped his hair out of his eyes, and the way he’d swim with his arms at his
sides, rippling his long, skinny body. In the water, standing on the bottom
step of the pool, he looked exotic, like a merman or something.
I started to think
about him, dream about him, in his plaid not-swimming shorts, standing mostly
naked on my parents’ patio.
At first, the dreams
weren’t anything remarkable. He’d just be smiling at me, like I’d done
something great. I mean, I’m not a complete asshole, but great? I have never,
ever been accused of greatness. As a football player, I was good enough to
play, but that was when I was pushing myself into the ground. As a student, I
was in the honors classes because I had outstanding tutors, but that was their
smarts, even if it was my sweat that made it stick. But at least in my dreams,
Oliver was staring up at me like I had just won the Super Bowl and solved world
hunger during the commercial break.
The first time I
dreamed that, I woke up almost in tears. I wanted to be back asleep, having
that dream so bad.
I didn’t think about
it then, and when I did think about it, I tried to focus on the fact that maybe
I should stop being a pussy about how bad I didn’t want to go to Berkeley. That
if I wanted people to look up to me like that, maybe I should try to be someone
worth looking up to.
When I wasn’t working,
or at the pool, I was reading. I figured if I could read some of the books that
Oliver read, I’d maybe get some of his quickness. I read A Separate Peace and
The Chocolate War, but all I really got out of them was that big clots of peer
pressure really fucked a kid up. I figured that I didn’t have to worry about
that shit anymore. My friends had all taken off.
I mean, we still
texted and saw movies together sometimes, but they were all working the same
internships and jobs that my dad had wanted me to work. Between the working,
the reading, and the swimming, more and more and more, my world revolved around
Oliver.
I was okay not having
that crowd of friends anymore. With all the reading Oliver and I were doing, we
were starting to get the same jokes. Like, when him, me, and Brian Halliday saw
that new Bourne movie. We were sitting there, watching guys kick ass on screen,
when suddenly it hit me. These movies were about spies who didn’t want to spy
anymore. They were getting reborn as someone else. And then, bing-bang-boom, I
was back with that Crime and Punishment book that Oliver had given me, and then
holy shit and hallelujah, I remembered Mr. Rochester and St. John and Jane
Eyre.
“Omigod omigod
omigod!” I hissed at Oliver. “Bourne! Get it? It’s like he’s been reborn!”
Oliver jerked, like
I’d given him a wedgie or something, and then he turned to me with a smile so
big, I swear it made the theater brighter. “God, Rusty, you totally nailed that
one.”
I grinned and then
turned to Brian, and he was shoving popcorn in his face. “Get it?” I whispered.
“It’s his name, but it means something. It’s like . . . like allegory.”
Brian squinted at me.
“Shut up and watch the movie,” he muttered. “People are looking at us funny.”
For a minute I was
real disappointed. I felt like I was seeing the sun for the first time, but
Oliver elbowed me and grinned and gave me the thumbs-up. For an irrational,
terrifying moment, I thought about grabbing his hand and kissing it, because I
was that fucking grateful, right?
But I didn’t. I turned
my attention back to the movie. Afterward, Oliver and I asked Brian if he
wanted to go out to ice cream with us, but he said no.
“I gotta be up early
in the morning,” he said, sounding like my dad. “If I’m not there on time, your
dad gets on my case. Jesus, Rusty, I can’t believe you came from that guy.”
Yeah. Brian had taken
the internship in my dad’s office, and I guess I was supposed to have taken the
one offered by his dad. Nice. Swapping us like the little game pieces we were
supposed to be seemed more and more cold-blooded.
“Don’t look at me.” I
shrugged. “I’m working construction. I get there at nine, I leave at five, and
my boss buys me soda when his son’s not looking. I got it good.”
“He does not.” Oliver
looked properly horrified. I smiled back at him. I loved grinning at him. I
wanted to wrap my arm around his neck and ruffle his hair, but that had never
been us.
“He does too,” I told
him, figuring Mr. Campbell wouldn’t mind too much if I gave this away. “But
only once a week. The rest of the time it’s horchata.” Which I didn’t
particularly like, but he meant well, so I drank it anyway.
Oliver smiled, very
proud of himself. “Yeah. My dad, he listens to me if he knows what’s good for
him.”
I looked at Brian to
try to share the awesome that was Oliver’s dad. “He does, too,” I told him
seriously. “I mean, I never in a million years thought anyone could actually .
. . you know . . . listen like this guy. He’s awesome to work for. I wish I
lived with him.”
Brian sneered. “Yeah,
well, you and Oliver get any cozier, maybe you can.”
I recoiled. “Man, what
crawled up your ass?”
“Not the same thing
that’s about to climb up yours.”
I looked at him,
floundering. “That’s so ugly,” I said at last, my voice low. “How come you
gotta be like that? You weren’t like that in school. You guys were always
really nice to Oliver in school.”
“Yeah, well, that’s
when we thought he was your friend. It’s a little different when he’s your
boyfriend. You know that, Rusty. It’s like . . . like we can let them hang
around us, but there’s got to be a line.”
“Besides,” Oliver said
quietly at my side. “They were like this in school. You were just too sweet to
take it that way.”
“Is that how you like
’em? Sweet?” Brian’s voice was nasty, and something in his face was hurt, too.
It hit me that he felt like he was losing me. And he was mad at Oliver because
Oliver was the one who would get me in the end.
“I . . .” I shut my
mouth and opened it again, and I wished suddenly that I was a kid again, in
grade school, where all you had to do was go out and catch the ball, and that
made kids your friends. “I’m sorry,” I said, turning to Oliver. “I’m sorry I
was too stupid to know they were being mean. You’ve been a real good friend to
me. I wouldn’t have let anyone be mean.”
Brian scoffed—and I
never knew what that word meant until I heard that sound come out of his mouth.
“God, Rusty. Have a
nice life. Give your mom my apologies for your going-away party. I’m not going
to make it.”
“You’re having a
going-away party?” Oliver asked, brightening, and I wanted to sit down and cry
on my knees.
“I guess it was a
surprise,” I said.
“And I guess you
weren’t invited,” Brian said to Oliver. “Which is great. It’ll just be Rusty
and his family staring at each other. I’m pretty sure after tonight, nobody
else is going to want to have a damned thing to do with you, either.”
And he turned and
walked off to his car. I watched him go, feeling empty and dumb.
“You know,” I said
into the warm night, “you’re really the only person I would want to come.”
Oliver reached up and
patted my shoulder. “That’s okay. I’ll show up anyway. You tell me where and
when, and I’ll be at your party.”
I was planning to tell
my mom, but she brought it up first. She’s like a ninja. I was walking out of
my room after my post-work shower, going to hunt up some more food in the
kitchen. I swear that woman heard the floorboard creak as I passed her office,
because her voice shot out like an arrow and stopped me in my tracks.
“Rusty, have you had a
falling out with your friends?”
I turned around and
looked into her office and saw the back of her head. Mom had blonde hair. I
think it was dyed, though, because if she missed her stylist appointment, her
roots were brownish gray. But I rarely got to see that, it was almost always
perfect. Some guys had moms who went running in public or sometimes wore sweats
or went camping and didn’t wash their hair for a week. My mom only sweat at the
gym, and since she went to one of those women-only gyms, we had to take her
word for it. Every day: slacks, a twinset, and pearls. I don’t think I remember
her wearing jeans.
Right now, she turned
the chair away from the dark-wood desk to face me and brushed her blonde hair
from her eyes in a way that looked like ballet.
“Yeah, Mom,” I said,
because apparently being not bright meant I couldn’t lie either. “They were
being mean to Oliver.”
Mom blinked and
adjusted her summer cardigan. This one was pink. “The little dark-haired boy?”
He wasn’t that little.
Five six? Five feet seven? Sure, I was almost six feet tall, but Oliver wasn’t
child-sized.
“Yeah, that’s the
one.”
“What would they have
against him? I mean, I know his father’s in construction, but I don’t think any
of your friends are that poorly mannered—”
“He’s gay, Mom—”
Mom jerked her head
back. “I did not know that,” she said. Her voice didn’t really rise, but she
gave the impression of a big ocean wave: same thing on the surface, but a vast
swell of power underneath. “Why is he here so often?”
I swallowed. I
reminded myself I’d suspected this. I’d thought my friends were decent, and I’d
been wrong, but I’d always known my parents were dicks, and I’d been right about
that.
“He’s my friend. He
helped me study for the SATs. And his father gave me my job.”
“Oh,” she said, and
her eyes were narrowed. She was doing some sort of calculation, I could tell.
“You owe a debt. I understand. Well, then . . .” Her voice trailed off, and I
could see that she was struggling with the sham of the “surprise party.” And
then an odd look crossed her face. Her eyes got big and shiny, and for a moment
her chin wrinkled. She took a deep breath, and everything smoothed out. “You
should invite him to your going-away dinner,” she said simply, as though this
was something I’d always known about. “It’s Tuesday, in two weeks. We’ll be
going out. Make sure he dresses appropriately.”
I heard her later,
cancelling caterers and fighting for her deposit back, and I felt bad. Maybe
that had been what the shiny eyes were all about. She was going to lose money
on this deal. That sucked, but I wasn’t going to go make up to all my shitty
friends and drop Oliver. For one thing, I was almost done with that Crime and
Punishment book, and I needed to talk to Oliver and find out if that really
scummy guy was a bad guy or just doing that stuff because he felt like he was
supposed to.
So Oliver came with
us. He was wearing an old suit jacket and jeans, with a white shirt underneath,
and he looked good. His wrists stuck out of the sleeves, though, like he’d
grown since he got it, and the color was blue. I don’t think the fabric was
that good. But that was okay. We sat through dinner while Nicole teased me about
how I was supposed to send her all the skinny on the professors and the quad
and the good places to hang out. I rolled my eyes and asked her how I’d know
these things anyway.
“You’ve always been
better at knowing the cool stuff,” I told her, and it was true. Nicole did like
to shop, but she liked to shop vintage music stores and antique shops and
stuff. She went to poetry readings in her spare time and could tell you who on
the bookstore shelf had actually grown up in our little spot in the foothills.
Before our town exploded into feeder suburbs to Intel, it used to be a little
artsy place with windy roads and lots of trees and big stretches of nothing. A
lot of our local authors wrote about the evil of industry and the soullessness
of the suburbs, which did absolutely nothing for me. At least Raskolnikov
killed people, right?
Nicole sighed and
rolled her eyes. “At least look for the places that Oliver would like to hang
out, okay?”
I grinned at Oliver.
“That’s easy. The library.”
Oliver grinned back.
“I even think that’s on the campus map,” he conceded.
I was suddenly struck
by a thought. (Which, you know, gets me into trouble.) “Wait, Oliver. Where do
you like to hang out?” I couldn’t remember him ever being anywhere besides my
house except for his house or the library.
Oliver’s face did a
weird thing then, and in a way, it reminded me of my mom’s face when she’d had
to cancel my party. “With you, dumbass.” He said it with a smile, and for a
moment, I thought he was going to zing me, but he pulled back somehow. Dumbass
didn’t sound like an insult when he said it. It sounded like sweetheart or baby
or one of those other gross words that girls liked us to call them.
But because it was
dumbass, it didn’t make me gag.
“Oh my God!” Nicole
rolled her eyes. “That’s gross. Men should never talk to each other that way.
Ever. I don’t care who they sleep with!”
“Nicole!” my mother
snapped, and my sister turned to her chicken and asparagus with a meekness I
did not believe. Sure enough, she looked up at me under her lowered brows, and
I stuck my tongue out at her. Her shoulders shook and her look shifted to a
glare, and then she looked next to me, to where Oliver was sitting (he got the
end on account of being left-handed), and I saw him sticking out his tongue and
crossing his eyes.
Nicole burst into
giggles, and Oliver and I joined her. My parents glared at the three of us, but
they weren’t going to start shrieking about manners in the middle of the
restaurant—that would be rude.
So it was a good
dinner. I thought I might miss Nicole when I was gone. When we were little, she
used to sneak into my room at night and sing silly kids songs to me. I don’t
know where she heard them—kindergarten, maybe? Preschool? Our mom wasn’t one
for singing nonsense songs, but Nicole remembered every one she heard. Probably
why she loved vintage vinyl records so much. Anyway, as we all walked through
the balmy air to the parking lot, I remembered that.
We’d driven in two
separate cars so I could pick Oliver up, and my Prius with the moonroof had a
decent backseat. I thought maybe some company would be nice.
“Nicole, you want to
ride with us?” I asked all of a sudden. “We can go for ice cream, and then get
home.”
Nicole looked up at me
with a smile on her round face while she pushed brown hair out of her eyes, and
for a moment, it looked like she was going to say yes. Then she grew
thoughtful, and she said, “No, Rusty. You go ahead. We’ve got tomorrow before
you leave, but you’ve only got Oliver for tonight.”
I shrugged and got
into the car, but, as dumb as I am, there were a few things I didn’t miss.
I didn’t miss the way
my parents glared at Nicole, and I didn’t miss the way she looked at them,
innocent as pie, which is how she usually looked when she’d been robbing my
drawers for those awful white T-shirts.
And I didn’t miss the
way Oliver beamed like a dark sun, either. It made me feel good, right? Because
he was my friend.
**~*~**
I meant to take us to
ice cream, but as I neared the turnoff for the strip mall that had the Ben
& Jerry’s in it, Oliver made a no sound.
“Just keep driving,”
he murmured, and so we did.
We rolled down the
windows and the wind was perfect. It smelled like cut brown grasses, because
the hills were scorched, and we drove the long straight highways through
Amador, listening to music and talking about what we thought college was going
to be like.
I said, “You know,
it’s probably going to look like the inside of my dorm room. I’m never going to
cut it.”
Oliver sighed, and
then I sighed too. It would have been nice if he could have lied to me, just
once, but that wasn’t him.
“Rusty?”
“Yeah?”
“You know, you can
email me when you’re gone, right? Text, Skype, all of that.”
I brightened a little.
All that shit. I’d forget. Oh crap, I should tell him that. “You’re going to
have to poke me a little, okay? You know, like now? I forget.”
Oliver shook his head.
“You don’t, really,” he said with an apologetic smile. “You just don’t like
calling people out of the blue. Once I text you or something, you’re all okay.”
His teeth glinted a little in one of the rare streetlamps, and he shook his
bangs out of his eyes. “Actually, Rusty, you’re sort of a little bit shy.”
My face heated in the confines
of the car, and I wished I could have stuck my head out the window like a big
yellow dog.
“You say that, and now
I’m all embarrassed,” I told him, and his laugh was a soft sound blown away by
the wind.
After about an hour of
driving out in the mostly rural country off Jackson Highway, I stopped at a gas
station to fill up. Oliver trotted inside and came out with two frosties in
cups, mine with lots of caramel and nuts.
He waited until I was
done pumping gas and said, “Pull over to the back of the station. You can savor
it then.”
I looked at him quick
and saw that he was laughing a little at the idea of savoring gas station ice
cream, and I laughed too. But behind the gas station, there was miles and miles
of nothing. Far off in the distance, you could see the lights that meant the
urban sprawl of Sacramento was starting, but there wasn’t even one light behind
the store.
Oliver and I both
leaned against the Toyota and “savored” our sweating ice cream. A breeze blew
across all of that dried nothing and I found I was scooting up against Oliver a
little for warmth. He didn’t seem to mind.
For a few moments, we
didn’t say a word, and the world was perfect.
Then, into the quiet,
Oliver said, “Rusty, if I try something, do you promise to still call me if it
doesn’t work?”
God, I’m dumb.
“Try something like
what? That thing with the computer so we can see each other? Because I can do
that already.”
Oliver laughed into
his empty ice-cream cup and talked about something else. “Rusty, who was the
last girl you dated?”
“Jennifer
Brukholtz—you remember, I told you about her?”
“No dick before
dinner,” Oliver said dryly. “Yeah. Not easy to forget.”
I sulked and scooped
out the last of the ice cream with my spoon, and then sucked the spoon upside
down on my tongue, creating a perfect seal. Oliver turned toward me, looking up
at me with those eyes that said I was all that. My tongue got sucked in around
the spoon and for a minute I was stuck, Oliver laughing at me, my tongue glued
to the roof of my mouth like every bad dream I’d ever had about public
speaking, except I wasn’t naked.
I had a sudden thought
then, of me naked, and Oliver in front of me the same way.
I stopped breathing,
and the spoon loosened from the top of my mouth and started to slide out.
Oliver caught it before it could stop dangling off my lips and put it in his
ice-cream cup. Very deliberately, he took the cup from me, put it in his own,
and set them both on top of the car behind me.
“You just thought
about it, didn’t you?” he asked quietly.
I’m dumb, remember? No
lying. I nodded my head and swallowed. “Yeah.”
There was just enough
light from behind us to see it dancing in the brown of his eyes.
“I’ve thought about it
a lot,” he said quietly. “And you’re leaving tomorrow. Which means if this
doesn’t work out, it’ll be okay. We’ll be friends and we’ll text and—”
“If what doesn’t work
out?” I asked, and his lips quirked upwards, leaving perfect apostrophes on
either side of his brown mouth.
“Just close your
eyes,” he said softly, and I did.
He moved slowly,
reaching behind my head and pulling it down, and when I was right where he
needed to be, he raised up a little. I could feel puffs of breath against my
mouth, and then a tickle against my lips. And another, harder. And one more, warmer.
I gasped, opening my
mouth, and his tongue swept in, teasing a little, until I teased back.
He sighed into my
mouth, and for a moment it felt like he was going to pull away, but I wasn’t
ready. I reached behind him and pulled him closer to me, and his tongue went
deeper. Ohhh . . . this was kissing. I sighed back at him, and he pulled away,
leaving me to suck on his tongue until the last minute, because I wanted him
some more.
And then it hit me.
Oliver had kissed me,
and I’d kissed him back.
I dropped my arms and
jerked back, cracking my elbow on the side of the car. Oliver took a hurried
step backward himself and gave a startled laugh, clapping his hand over his
mouth.
“Oh my God, Rusty, are
you okay?” His words came out muffled from behind his fingers. He was still
laughing.
I rubbed my elbow and
tried to breathe through that funny-bone pain that is almost as not funny as
getting kissed by your best male friend when you thought you were straight.
“I’m a little
confused,” I told him honestly. “And my elbow hurts.”
He ventured closer and
hesitantly put his hands on my shoulders. I wanted to shrug them off and remind
him that I wasn’t gay, but I didn’t. They felt good there, soothing, and I
lowered my head and let him touch me.
“You don’t have to do
anything,” he said quietly. “You don’t have to kiss me back or worry that I’ll
do that again. Just . . . think about it, okay? Just think about it, and we’ll
be friends like we always have been.”
I nodded, but I didn’t
move. I must have at some point, I know, because we eventually got back into
the car and drove home, but I don’t remember that moment when we stepped away
from each other. In fact, for a long time, my head was still there, listening
to cicadas and feeling the touch of his hands and the tender wind of his breath
on my face.
