151 Days (28 page)

But then that’s it.

It falls to the ground, and it gathers under your feet and just makes a huge mess. It doesn’t look so nice later in the night, and everyone just tries to ignore it, and the people whose job it is to clean it up? I assure you they hate glitter in a biblical way. So then you go home, you change, you shower, you wonder how all that crap got in your hair, and you go to sleep. The glitter is in a trash bag and the night is over. In the end, it served no purpose at all outside of being a momentary flash of magic in an otherwise mundane life.

The only other time glitter matters is months later, when you pull a shirt out and you see some embedded into it. And you wonder how it got there, and then the memory of that night drifts through your mind, and through the filter of time passed, the whole night becomes magical retroactively. Then you shake your head, wonder whatever happened to that guy, brush it out of your shirt, and get ready for work.

And that’s it. A moment of magic and then the memory of it later. Glitter and teenage romance—equally useless, equally disposable.

So in my mind, the fact these two boys had decided to end things sooner rather than later was a good thing. They both had their real lives coming up, and it was time to leave high school life behind. Or as it has been said: When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. See how I said that and nothing began to smoke or sizzle? I was under the opinion it was time for these two boys to become men.

But all you have to do is look at nearly anything in the world and see my opinion does not mean much outside my own head.

So when the first boy came to me for advice, as all young and naive commoners do in fairy tales, I wanted to tell him to stay the course and just wait it out until he graduated. It was a sensible plan and, I think, the right thing to do. Of course, though, I had made other promises. I had already sworn I would help get the two boys back together, so help I would.

The things I do for the greater good sometimes.

“So, big day Monday, huh?” I asked Kyle as he folded the pile of clothes in front of him.

He didn’t say a thing as he just kept folding.

“Bueller? Bueller?” I droned, getting his attention.

“Huh?” he asked. The look on his face made it look like he had actually forgotten I was there. A mortal sin, to be sure, but in this case the boy got a pass.

“I said, big day Monday?”

He nodded and went back to folding.

God save me from teenage queens and their funks.

I grabbed the sweater out of his hands, and he looked up at me in confusion. “If you’re going to be helping me, I need you to actually be here and not be moping because you’re too stupid to take your boyfriend back.”

There was a momentary glimmer of the stubbornness I knew was inside him. “I’m here.”

I held up the sweater. “You’ve been folding this for twenty minutes now. Unless you’re going to turn it into a swan or something, I think it’s safe to say you’re distracted.”

He sighed and went to grab another piece of clothing.

“I swear to you, if you put your grubby little hands on one more piece of merchandise in hopes you can use it to ignore me some more, I will personally shove it so far up your ass you will hiccup fabric swatches.”

A small smile flickered across his mouth, and I knew my declaration had done its job.

Finally he admitted, “I just thought he’d be there with me the first day.”

“Then answer your phone one of the fifty times he calls you every day and take him back. Problem solved.” I began to fold the sweater myself.

“It’s better this way,” he said, sounding the same way you’d say it’s better for Fluffy if you put her down because she is just in pain. It’s not something you want to do, but once you make the decision, you just can’t look the cat in the eye again. Kyle didn’t want to look Brad in the eye again because if he did, he’d crack, and all this drama would be forgotten. “I mean, it was never going to work anyways.”

My hands paused as I heard my own words coming out of his mouth.

It was one thing to hear that kind of defeatist dogma come out of someone who was in no way old but older than Kyle, but to hear it from his mouth… well, that was just too depressing for words. I put the sweater down and looked him right in the eye. “Well, if you jump out of the boat at the first sign of trouble, then yes, you’re right, you are going to get wet. Of course, if you know you’re going to lose before you play, then you don’t ever have to go to Vegas, and if you know you’re going to die eventually, you don’t need to live. So you have that whole life thing wrapped up there, my young friend.”

He said nothing for a few seconds and then asked, “How did we get to Vegas boats?”

It was a nice feint, and with anyone else it might have worked. “Nice try, but it’s far too late to start playing dumb when you don’t like the conversation. Sure Sporty Spice fucked up, but instead of trying to work it out, you just blew up the whole thing in seconds flat. Now I am not his biggest fan, but I do know there are way worse things than talking about your sex life to someone else. It’s not like he posted it on Facebook for the world to see, and you know what? I think you know that. So what is this really about?”

Kyle and I had danced around the subject of the breakup for two weeks now, and up to now I had backed off out of respect and all that garbage. Okay, fine, I backed off because I honestly didn’t have the heart to go the ten rounds it was going to take to get Kyle to admit what the real problem was. That, and I suppose deep down I was hoping he would fix it himself.

“I just realized there was no way it was going to work between us,” he said, grabbing a shirt to fold.

“And you based this on your years and years of experience of dating and healthy relationships?” He paused and glared angrily at me. “No, really, explain it to me, because what do I know? I’ve only dated more men than are named in the Bible, so what do I know? Educate me, Kyle. Tell me why it wasn’t going to work out.”

He dropped the shirt and stood up. “I don’t think I need to explain myself to you.”

It was a pretty good imitation of me, but it lacked the pizzazz it needed to have any effect. “You’re right. You don’t need to say shit to me.” He nodded and began to grab his coat. “But you think Brad deserves one or two?”

I saw him stiffen for half a second, and I knew. If I hadn’t just sunk his battleship, I had at the very least scored a direct hit on it. “See you later,” he said, walking out without turning back.

“Dammit,” I said out loud. “I couldn’t have waited to alienate him until he finished with his stack?”

A
N
HOUR
from closing someone new walked in my door.

Now I am not an expert on all things Foster, and I will admit I don’t have a picture directory to keep all the names and faces together. The town gets bunched up into categories in my mind, where they are stored for memory’s sake. There are old people, which there are a lot of. There are hicks, which there are more of. There are kids, a word that spans from babies to Kyle. There are guys I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, and there is Tyler.

Tyler gets his own space because no one in the world deserves to be shelved next to him.

The guy who walked into the store fell into none of those.

He was bigger than the average Foster boy, and I don’t mean fat. He was wider, huskier, and I suppose, in the right light, handsome. He wasn’t my type, but then lately nothing was my type. He was my age, which was odd because I thought I had a working knowledge of everyone my age in Foster. Normally I would have thought he was a new resident, but from the clothes he had on to the way he carried himself, I knew he was a Foster clone.

“Help you?” I asked cheerfully, trying to keep any suspicion out of my voice.

“Just looking around,” he said distractedly. “Do you guys sell jackets?”

“Back corner.” I pointed, noticing he had a pretty nice jacket on already.

He sorted through the racks slowly, almost too slowly for my taste. Oh sure, tell me I’m being overdramatic, but I just knew sooner or later someone would come into the shop meaning me harm. True, I expected them years ago, but it doesn’t change the fact I did not trust anyone from this town at all. I panicked slightly as I realized I didn’t have a weapon to my name, so I put my hand on Liza’s book and waited.

He continued to browse for a length of time no straight man has ever browsed before. My mind shifted from paranoia to suspicion as I took a careful inventory of him. His clothes were nice, too nice for Foster, but they still had rustic feel, so he wouldn’t stand out. His hair was cut short, which seemed to be the cut guys around here favored, but there was product in it, which reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t place who. It wasn’t until he walked to another rack that I had him.

His shoes were to die for.

Most guys around here either wore disgusting work boots that looked like they had been salvaged from World War II or tennis shoes that some Indonesian kid earned half a cent making before they ended up on clearance at Walmart. These were leather, John Varvatos chukka boots that were two hundred bucks if they were a dollar. This guy was rocking some decent hetero camouflage, but I’m sorry, sweetie, your shoes just clocked you as a ’mo. Which meant he wasn’t here to beat me to death… so then, who was he?

“You new to town?” I asked, trying to make the question sound as innocent as possible. I had long ago found that nearly anything that came out of my mouth was either taken as sarcastic or flirty, given how much alcohol I had imbibed, so I had crafted a voice that to me sounded nothing like either extreme.

He looked over at me with an odd expression. Finally, he shook his head and went back to looking at clothes. “No, I grew up around here. I just moved back, though.”

“Oh,” I said, actually surprised. The thought of someone willingly moving back to this town seemed ludicrous to me. I mean, it had taken Riley months and months to talk me into giving up the real world to come back and settle down in Mayberry, and even then it was a hard sell. He had argued for days and days that the town was nothing like what I thought it was and that we would be deliriously happy here.

My sister also once convinced me that the Easter bunny only hid eggs that it found in the house it was visiting and talked me into hiding a dozen eggs under my bed a week before to help him out. Of course, I forgot about them, and a month later the smell began to seep out under my bed and permeate everything I owned. My mom lost her shit when she found out what the smell was and punished both of us severely.

I was seven years old at the time, and that decision was about as dumb as moving here.

“Family problems?” I asked after a few seconds. He looked up at me again. This time the look on his face was even more confused, so I added quickly, “I just can’t imagine many reasons for someone to move back here willingly.”

A smile seemed to flicker over his mouth, and I had to admit, for not my type he was kind of cute. “I don’t have to ask if you’re from Foster or not.”

I held a hand to my chest. “Moi? What gave me away? Lack of livestock? Complete sentences? My keen fashion sense?”

“Actually, the spiked hair and eyeliner kind of cinched it,” he said with a grin.

“I’m Robbie,” I said, extending a hand to him.

“Matt,” he said, shaking it before going back to the clothes.

“So what brings you in?” I asked, now definitely curious.

“I was just looking to see the lay of the land,” he explained as he continued to poke at the rack. “Just trying to catch up with the town and everything. I remember this place being a bit more….”

“
Golden Girls
?” I prompted him.

He nodded slowly. “I was going to say
Maude
, but same difference.”

“I bought it a few years ago and decided Foster was ready for actual fashion.” I pointed at him. “Kind of like your shoes.”

He looked down at them and then back up to me. Damned if he didn’t blush. “Shit,” he said more to himself. “I thought I had done so well too.”

“From afar, you did,” I said, almost laughing at his expression. “But in this town, you could have had a matching clutch and not have been as obvious as those shoes.”

“Can you blame me for buying them?” he asked with a sparkle in his eye.

Was he flirting with me? For real?

“No, but then again they aren’t my style.”

He shrugged. “Well, to each his own.” He grabbed a couple of shirts and walked up to the counter. “I’ll take these.”

I folded them up and then rang them up. “So, Matt moved back to town. Care to tell me the real reason you came in here?”

I saw his hands freeze as he unfolded his wallet. This guy was cute, but if he came in here to flirt with the only gay guy in town, then it was my obligation to tell him he was a tree or two away from the one he should be barking at. He slowly pulled a credit card out. “That obvious, huh?” he asked, handing it to me.

“To the casual observer?” I said, swiping the card. “No. But when someone your size comes in, looks through five racks, and ends up grabbing two shirts that wouldn’t fit over your chest, I begin to wonder what’s up.” I handed him the bill to sign.

“My size?” he asked with what I assumed was mock offense. “You calling me fat?”

I took the receipt and closed the drawer. “No, fat is not the word that comes to mind. Healthy, fit, built like a brick house? More accurate.”

He put his wallet away and took a deep breath. Here it came, the eventual ask out that I was going to have to shoot down. Poor guy.

“I’m dating Tyler.”

“I’m sorry, but….” And my brain locked up. “You said what?” I asked before I was even aware.

“My name is Matt Wallace, and I am dating Tyler Parker,” he repeated a little slower. “I had heard about you and wanted to see you with my own eyes.”

A coldness seemed to emanate from my chest outward to my extremities. It felt like the reverse of having an IV of morphine, where the warmness moves through your veins eventually to your heart, taking you to a most magical place where things like pain have no power. This was the complete opposite of that feeling. Instead of numbness, I felt raw pain, as for half a second, I felt everything from that night Riley died replay. Someone associated with Tyler being this close just broke past the paper thin walls I had separating me from my memories, and I hated it.