Every Time I Think of You (11 page)

Chapter 15

Through the thankfully brief ride home, Mrs. Forrester, aided by a few drinks, acted more than cheerful, apparently as yet uninformed of our little escapade. Everett’s father dropped me off with a curt, “Good night,” while from the back seat, Everett offered nothing but a parting wink.

Back inside the house, I slumped onto the couch, my tux in slight disarray like some junior James Bond. The combination of alcohol and Everett’s inspiring brash actions sparked my moment of bravery.

My father turned his attention away from a book and the softly playing Herb Alpert record as I sighed, “I’m in love.”

“Are you now?”

Despite the late hour, I had his attention, and figured I might as well head off any upcoming gossip or crisis. Mr. Forrester would probably want to talk with my dad, or beat him up, or do whatever fathers do. Since my father had never been in such a situation with me, it seemed sensible to prepare him.

“Okay.” He turned the music down a little, looked down the hallway, as if expecting Mom to enter with perfect timing to relieve him of this sudden parental duty. A quizzical frown came over him, like when he’d sit hunched over the dining room table doing some after-work accounting while piecing together old cardboard jigsaw puzzles to break up the monotony.

He wouldn’t erupt in hatred or rage. I knew that. He wasn’t a religious man, or a bigoted man, but merely a calm intelligent soul who had just realized that the missing puzzle piece was right in front of him.

“Your little friend, the Forrester kid.”

“Bingo.” And then my eyes welled up, perhaps from the drink, with a happy sort of relief that I was sharing the knowledge of this bundled up joy.

Dad withheld a chuckle. “You’ve been, I dunno, a little different lately, but happier. I thought he was just your friend, but I guess I wasn’t even looking.”

“There is this … situation. We kinda got caught makin’ out tonight, so, I just wanted to give you a heads up, in case it gets around.”

I didn’t remember taking off my tux and hanging it up so neatly before passing out in my bed, but I did. At least I think I did. I didn’t wake up until my mother barged into my bedroom around noon.

“Telephone. Your ___friend, Everett.”

She said it exactly like that, pausing where she could have said ‘boy.’ Dad had obviously had a follow-up conversation that morning as I slept off my hangover. I think my mother was more upset that I hadn’t come out to her first.

Groggy and queasy, in a T-shirt, some sweatpants over the previous night’s shorts and my itchy black socks, I followed her into the kitchen and picked up the phone.

“I’m totally grounded,” Everett growled.

“Dude,” I whispered, “is your dad gonna–”

“Him? No, don’t worry. He’s … Don’t worry about it. Dad and my mom had a big fight about something else, and I’m in trouble by extension, plus the drinking, so I can’t see you today and I gotta head back to school tonight. My dad’s got chauffeur duties, even though it’s two hours out of his way.” A bit of silence, then, “So, anyway, we had fun, yeah?”

“No, no, it’s … Sure. This weekend’s no good. We have a home game Saturday after next. They have guest dorms, but we’ll figure something out.”

I assumed he meant that we would have to concoct some clandestine scheme to make out in private, if at all. But more than that, I couldn’t understand how he could be so casual, let alone not hung over. Would my visiting mean anything? Would it mean too much?

“You think your parents’ll be cool with it?” Everett asked.

Recalling my drunken confessions of the previous night, I snuck a peek around the hallway toward the kitchen and living room. While Mom angrily scrubbed some surface, Dad calmly read the Sunday paper.

The next week, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant nearly blew up on the other side of Pennsylvania. People starting talking about panicking, but nobody panicked. Gas lines got longer, then shortened. My dad held some serious discussions with some business associates most evenings about their truck drivers. The news on television and in the papers honed in on our state in a somewhat gruesome fascination with the near-disaster area that it was.

I thought about doing an extra credit paper for Biology on the potential effects of nuclear fallout on the environment, but I couldn’t muster any interest. I didn’t expect my level of apathy, nor did my parents.

“I would think you would care more, with your interest in nature,” Mom said over a humorless dinner.

“Actually, I do. It’s just, if we’re going to all die of radiation, I’d like to have one more visit with my, uh, ___friend.”

What I didn’t expect was my mom allowing my visit, but then only a day beforehand telling me she needed her car. She seemed upset about something, that something being me.

I told her that was fine, I would simply take a bus and jog the rest of the way. They didn’t know I was bluffing, that there were no buses to Saltsburg. Despite that, and in spite of my mother, Dad casually tossed me his car keys.

I’m pretty sure it was all good timing that I was leaving for a day, because for the first time in years, my parents were about to have an argument.

Chapter 16

A brick castled estate, a miniature fortress, a quaint campus, a beguiling maze of handsome young men in jackets and ties, Pinecrest Academy for Boys fulfilled most of my expectations. While the campus was a bit smaller than I’d expected, it had the look of prep authenticity.

Everett told me to just meet him on the field, but by the time I arrived, the players were already warming up. Less than fifty fans sat in the bleachers, somewhat arranged in clusters for one team or the other. Being a home game, most of those fans were Pinecrest students and a few parents.

Although I had expressed my disinterest in team sports, specifically ones which involve a ball of some kind being tossed back and forth, because it was Everett’s sport, I had done a little research and checked out a book about it from the library. Discovering that its heritage stemmed from Native American history going back centuries made the game appear less odd and more of an underdog sport.

Everett raced across the field in his shorts, jersey, gloves and a helmet that resembled a motorcycle-football hybrid. His schoolmates hooted and hollered for their every goal and turnover as I sat quietly, marveling at Everett’s every leap and jump. Watching any other game would have left me unfazed. But with Everett on the field, I found myself rapt by following his every move. The somewhat revealing shorts helped.

More than a few times, though, some rough hits knocked players to the ground in a surprisingly violent manner. Players were frequently fouled, and it didn’t let up until the final minutes as Pinecrest trounced the opposing private school team by several points.

After his jovial backslapping herd of teammates left to change in the locker room, Everett sought me out in the stands. I stepped off the bleachers.

“Whadja think?” he said, beaming as he pulled off his helmet.

I thought not to make any overt gesture of affection, but before I knew it, his sweaty body wrapped itself around me. Returning with a congratulatory hug, his shoulder pads crunched against my chest.

“Excellent. It was really exciting.”

“Coming from you, that means a lot.”

A few other boys interrupted our moment together with more hugs and hoots. I pulled back, admiring it all, yet knowing I was out of their circle of athletic joy. My own experience with cross country rarely involved cheering, instead runners finding a bit of grass upon which to kneel, collapse or vomit.

“Be back in a bit,” Everett tossed off as he left.

Waiting for him in the bleachers as students and families departed, I gazed out over the nearly empty field. One of the team assistants picked up various stray paper cups near the benches, along with a water cooler and a few shin guards. At one point, his arms too full of objects, he tripped on the side of a bench and fell flat on his back.

The celebratory informal pizza party was held in a game room in one of the dorm buildings. Everett’s teammates made cheerful and surprisingly non-obscene jokes, some of which I didn’t understand, because they were in Latin, fewer of which were explained to me.

Seated at the room’s edge, I was an anomaly, a politely welcomed outsider, just “Ev’s buddy.” The lone guy not wearing a button-down shirt and loosened tie, I felt a bit out of place. There appeared to be a silent understanding, that the truth of our intimacy was possibly known but not mentioned by them.

For some reason, Everett stayed too far away from me to even have a discussion, or for me to suggest we leave. I began to wonder why I’d visited him. What upset me most was Everett’s complicity in the situation, as if he refused to be inconvenienced by my presence, that he would not alter his plans to accommodate his guest.

I knew to play the role, compliment his teammates, engage in a few dry quips and laugh at clever jokes. For the length of the party, which dragged on for more than two hours, I stole glances at the boys who seemed to be his closer friends, and wondered which one of them had taken that revealing Polaroid of him.

Finally, after some of the boys had retreated to their rooms, Everett gave me a tour of his own dorm. I had naively hoped to sleep there until being introduced to Randall, his studious roommate, who was not going anywhere.

Everett changed into track pants, a T-shirt, sweatshirt and a jacket, put a few items from a drawer into his pockets, then briefly retreated to the bathroom. My attempts at small talk with his nearly mute roommate crashed and burned.

“We’re going for a walk,” Everett announced upon returning. “I’m taking Reid to the guest dorm.” The roommate nodded, said nothing.

Everett shook his head. “Sorry. The night staffer there’s an old crank. I can go in with you for a while, but we have a curfew at eleven. We can go into town to a little diner in a while, if you like.”

“Sure.”

So, that was it? Thanks for visiting, let’s have a cheeseburger, and goodnight?

“Anyway, big day, huh?” I said, hoping to refrain from complaining about not having any time alone with him. The early evening air was a bit damp. Crickets chirped somewhere.

I explained my own calculations on my probable place in the race, based on the other guys in our district, my time rates and training schedule changes, until I realized he wasn’t listening, so I shut up. We were in the woods. It was pretty.