After School Activities (9 page)

“You’ve, uh, done this with many girls?” I asked.

“You really want to know?”

Yes. “No, I guess not.”

He sighed. “I forced myself, hoping it would, I don’t know, change

me. I never made it this far with any girl, I couldn’t make myself do it. But I had to keep up appearances.”

I gave his hand a squeeze. I hooked the blanket with my foot, lifting

it until I could reach it with my free hand and pull it over us. “I

understand,” I said, snuggling into Adam.

He snorted in disbelief. “Yeah, right.”

“Um, contrary to popular belief, I did not burst out of my mother’s

vagina on the back of a rainbow in a cloud of glitter. I realized I was gay

pretty young, but that didn’t stop me from hating myself for a while. I

tried to play the ‘I promise I’m straight’ game for almost five years. I’ve

only been out since the eighth grade.” Adam had squeezed my hand when

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I said I used to hate myself. It was a silent bit of protest, of reassurance. It was sweet.

“If you hated yourself for being gay, then how… I mean, why did

you come out?”

“I’m not keen on dishonesty.
Especially
with myself. Plus, Kai

helped me stop hating myself.”

“How?”

“By telling me he cared about me. Making me realize other people

cared about me. It’s quite a bit more difficult to go on thinking you’re

worthless when people whose opinions you value keep insisting

otherwise.”

“Yeah. That makes sense.” He sounded sad. “Malachi sounds like a

good friend.”

“He’s the best friend.”

“My friends would never have done that.”

I let go of his hand to wrap my arms around him, laying my head on

his chest. “I’m sorry.”

He put his arm around me. “It’s okay. If any of them had told me

they cared about me, I probably would have punched them and called

them a fag. So, I guess it’s not entirely their fault.” He started idly playing with my hair. “But that doesn’t matter anymore. Only one more year of

this and I’ll be out of here. College will be a new place, with new people,

I’ll be able to start over.”

“So you’ve decided you’re going?” Last we’d talked about it, Adam

had been torn between wanting to go and feeling like he needed to stay

with his family.

“Yeah. Mom has already started picking out what schools she thinks

I should go to. I’m like, Mom, I’m not going to be able to even apply until

next year, but it is all she can talk about these days. It’s like she thinks she won’t….” He trailed off, but I knew what he had been about to say.
Like

she thinks she won’t be around next year.
I squeezed him a little tighter.

He cleared his throat. “Anyway, the schools she’s picked are way out of

my league. She wants me to apply to the most prestigious universities in

the country, but I’ll never get in.”

“Why not? Your grades are good enough.”

“I guess. But I still have to take the SAT, and I’m bad at

standardized tests.”

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After School Activities

It was starting to sound like Adam was making excuses, like he had

already decided he was going to fail and so wasn’t going to even try.

There was no way I was going to let that fly.

“I’ll help you.”

“I don’t know….”

“I’m serious. I’ve always been good at those. They’re pretty easy

once you get the knack.” Adam started to say something, but I cut him off.

“Listen, you can argue all you want, but I’m helping you study and in two

years your mom will be visiting you at Yale, or wherever.”

Adam shrugged, but at least he didn’t disagree. It was a start. I

was still surprised that Adam was so insecure about all this. It was a

little weird to reconcile that big, bravado-fueled jock I thought I’d

known for all those years with this introspective, caring guy I was

discovering him to be. I was really glad he had finally revealed himself

to me, and not just in the naked-in-my-bed kind of way. I realized that,

somewhere along the line, I had started to care for Adam.

It was a weird thought.

“What about you?” Adam asked. “What do you want to do when you

graduate? What’s your dream?”

“Oh, something small. Ruler of the World. Batman. That kind of

thing.”

Adam laughed. “I’m serious. I want to know.”

“My dream? Like, that thing you’ll probably never do, maybe even

never try for, but sometimes you just sit and fantasize about?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. Nothing.”

“Oh come on! You obviously have something in mind.”

I hesitated. My dreams were, well, personal.

“Well, sometimes, when I think about my future—and obviously this

would probably never happen—but sometimes I dream about running

away to some monastery at the top of a mountain or something, and

spending the rest of my life singing hymns, like some kind of Gregorian

monk.”

“Weird haircut and everything?”

“Weird haircut, scratchy brown robe, vow of silence, all of it. I

picture a huge Gothic cathedral, silent but for the reverberations, the dying 49

Dirk Hunter

echoes of the last hymn. Surrounded by giant stained glass windows,

which are always lit by epic sunsets in my imagination, by the way. I’d

spend my days singing and reading—they might frown on all the sci-fi,

but I’m sure I could work something out—and doing good deeds, and

polishing stained glass windows. Really, the fantasies are, like, seventy

percent stained glass window themed.”

“I didn’t know you were very religious.”

“Oh, I’m not, really. I mean, I believe in God. Jesus is pretty cool,

though I don’t really care whether he really was the son of God or not. The

story is powerful enough on its own. And besides, even if there is no God,

no higher power of any kind, that doesn’t make the universe one iota less

amazing, though maybe a tiny bit more depressing. So if I’m not singing

praises to some omnipotent deity, then it’s to the marvelous entirety of

existence. It doesn’t especially matter to me either way.”

“Worship the universe, huh?”

“Not worship, exactly. More like appreciate. Rather than just take

advantage of. People tend to only wonder how to use all the miracles of

existence to make their lives easier, which I guess is important too. But I

don’t think they do enough of that. Appreciate the world and all the things

in it, I mean. So I would kind of like to spend my life doing exactly that.”

“Appreciation through song and stained glass windows.”

“Exactly.”

“I like it.”

“Really?”

Adam laughed. “Yeah. Why? Is that surprising?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never really told anyone this before.”

“Not even Malachi?” Adam sounded pretty incredulous.

“Especially not Kai. He’d just make fun of me. Rightfully so. It is

kind of silly. And not, like, in a malicious way or anything. He’d tease me

like he does about everything. With anything else I’d be fine with it,

but….”

“But when it’s your secret dream, it’s different.”

“Yeah.”

“I get that. But if you do decide to go the Batman route, I can

always murder your parents for you. You know, anything to help out.”

We laughed, then lay for a while in comfortable silence.

Eventually, Adam said, “What time is it?”

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After School Activities

“Nooooooo,” I protested.

“I don’t think ‘no’ is a time.”

“Asking what time it is inevitably leads to saying ‘look at the time! I

have to go.’ How about we just don’t?”

But Adam wasn’t going to be dissuaded. He pushed me off him,

slipped out of the bed, and padded across the room to where his pants

were folded on my desk. He rifled through them and found his phone.

“It’s almost three,” he said to me, then to himself, “Holy shit, that’s

a lot of messages.”

I still lay in bed, watching him standing there, completely naked,

listening to voice mails. There might be better ways to spend Saturday

afternoons, but I had a hard time thinking of one. He stood with his head

cocked to one side, hand on his hip, lower lip caught distractedly in his

teeth. I was getting hard, thinking of the things I’d like to do once I

convinced him to come back to bed. But as he listened to the messages, a

change started to come over his face. Tension returned to his jaw. His

eyes became harder, losing the warmth I had seen when he looked at me.

He started to fidget.

Finally, the messages came to an end. He started pulling on his

pants, turning away from me. “I should go,” he said.

See? I was right. Time-checking always leads to me-leaving. It’s an

undeniable fact. But it didn’t seem appropriate to bring that up again, as

much as I wanted to do an I-told-you-so gloat.

Instead, I said, “Who were the messages from?”

“Pete,” Adam said, pulling on his shirt. “He left me six messages. He

started off crying, saying he was sorry, that he didn’t want to become like

Dad. Begging me to forgive him. Then he got mad I wasn’t answering.

Then the apologizing again.” He sighed. “I need to go home.”

Wordlessly, I slipped out of bed, walked over and grabbed Adam in

a hug. At first he stood there, like he was stubbornly resisting the

affection. Then he hugged me back, squeezing so tight my ribcage almost

split open like a nut.

“Thanks,” he whispered in my ear.

“You could, just, not.”

“And stay here forever?”

“I mean, if you wanted.”

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He sighed deeply and broke off the hug. “I can’t, as cool as that

would be. He’s being an ass, but he’s family. I can’t just leave.” He went

to the window and opened it. I shivered at the sudden blast of cold air.

Adam once again popped the screen out of the window, but stopped short

of stepping out. He turned back to me and eyed me from head to toe as

though memorizing the sight of my still naked body. I fidgeted a little

self-consciously at the scrutiny. Adam stepped back up to me and

paused, looking a little nervous. Bashful, almost. He gave me a quick

peck on the lips. “Bye,” he said. And he left, popping the screen back in

the window from the outside.

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After School Activities

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE ASTUTE observer might have noticed by now that I was in a bit of a

bind. Less than a month ago, I had been a slightly lonely, though

impossibly charming, seventeen-year-old with absolutely no romantic

prospects on the horizon and, honestly, I wasn’t really looking for any. I

certainly wasn’t expecting any. But now I found myself with two, equal in

appeal and in confusion.

What was I going to do?

If this were any other situation, I could do what I usually did when I

needed to figure something out: talk it over with Kai. But for the first time in our friendship, I didn’t know if I could. It wasn’t like it was right before I came out to Kai, when I had been afraid of what he would say or do, or if

our friendship would survive. It was more like this nagging feeling he

couldn’t help. That he was too involved in the situation. I certainly

couldn’t talk to Mel about it, not without betraying Kai’s trust. It was

obvious he didn’t want her to know about him and me. In my desperation I

even considered asking my parents for advice.

Hey Mom, Dad, I’ve been fucking Kai. It’s not what you think—

he’s probably still straight. My bully, on the other hand, is suddenly all

gay for me. Thoughts? You know, maybe it would be worth it, just to see

the look on their faces. But no, there was only one thing that was going to

work. Awkward as it might be, Kai was my best friend, and I could trust

him to help me figure out how I felt. And hopefully find out more about

how he felt.

“You’re still coming over tonight, right?” I asked him at the lunch

table on Monday. Mel was in line for food, and I had seized the

opportunity to talk to Kai alone.

“You bet your ass I am.” He waggled his eyebrows at me.

“That’s not what I meant,” I began, but before I could clarify, Mel

joined us at the table.

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Dirk Hunter

“What’s not what you meant?” she asked. Kai immediately turned

his attention to the food on his tray, leaving me to face Mel’s inquisitive,

arched eyebrows alone.

“Uhhhh… nothing. Kai was just being an asshole.” Kai snickered,

probably thinking I’d made some kind of innuendo, or at least a pun.

Dammit, Mel, I was trying to get Kai’s mind
off
sex for a little while.

Mel looked unconvinced, but she didn’t press further. “Speaking of

assholes,” she said.

I turned to see what Mel was talking about. Adam was heading

straight toward us.
Because of course
that’s what would happen right then.

I had sort of hoped I might avoid being in any kind of close quarters with

both Adam and Kai, but apparently that was out of the question. As if I

needed more proof that God had a sense of humor. A sense of humor

apparently influenced by too many sitcoms and practical jokes.

Adam smiled when he saw me look his way, which only made

things worse. It made me realize that I too was happy to see him, which

set off another round of confusion fireworks. Especially when I