Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover (14 page)

Of course having people start to talk about me being a faggot was a real bummer. I had worked so hard for so many years to blend into the woodwork, to be transparent, to stay safely tucked inside my shell. To suddenly have all that work evaporate in a day was overwhelming. And it was a bit scary. I wasn’t a jock. I exercised and lifted weights, but I wasn’t a big hulking guy who could scare bullies away by flexing something. I knew that bigots were bullies and loved to mock what they didn’t understand. I dreaded what could happen at school, probably when I least expected it.

Bill had done an absolutely masterful job of deflecting the issue after calculus class that afternoon. I was so wowed by what he said, and how he didn’t punch the idiot. Watching the man in action was awesome. I couldn’t wait to get to my room and hug the stuffing out of him.

Still, I worried that I was the reason he was gonna get lots of crap. He was a jock. He was popular. He was well liked. People came to watch him at track meets and basketball games and cheered him on. Me? They didn’t know me. And now, if this spread—
if
? It was high school; news spread faster than an STD—he could lose so much. The higher you are, the farther you have to fall.

After school while we briefly cuddled on my bed, I was preoccupied with my fears that I was going to potentially be an anchor around Bill’s neck, dragging him down from his well-earned place in the school society. It had taken years and lots of work for him to get where he was today. I hated the thought that I might be the reason he lost this incredibly important part of his identity just for associating with me, and just when so much of the rest of his world was crumbling.

At dinner that evening, Bill asked my dad a simple question I had wondered about. “What happened in the house last night after we left?”

My dad looked at him for a moment and answered, “He will never be a problem for you again. And we didn’t kill him and bury the body back in the woods, if that’s what you’re thinking. Do you know how hard it would be to dig a hole when the ground is this frozen?”

I couldn’t help but laugh, which is exactly what he wanted us to do.

“I’m not gonna go into the details, but we’ve got a bit of a routine we’ve developed. Yours is sadly not the first family to suffer abuse at a family member’s hand. All I’m gonna say is that we had a little ‘come to Jesus’ talk.”

“Wait, wait. You’ve done this before? Who? When?” Bill asked, surprised.

My dad took my mom’s hand, and together they answered his question by telling a bit about what I had learned last night.

At the end of the story, Bill simply said, “Thank you.” That was about all he could get out. He was so overcome with emotion at that point that he seemed to simply be shutting down. He was still with us, but his expression was neutral, unreadable.

My mom told him that his mother was safe and that she had some really good folks with her to help her get through the days and weeks ahead. He wanted to know where, but my mom was adamant that the safe houses were safe because they were a secret. She assured him that he and his mother would see each other and talk, but that she had a lot of healing to do emotionally and psychologically… as did he.

T
HE
next day I had my regularly scheduled gym class, the class in which I got to use the weight room to try to develop some muscles in the quest to do my bit to stay physically fit. Usually I was the only person who used the weight room at that particular time, so as I worked out I tended to enter a private workout zone in my head. I had my iPod earbuds in my ears, and music playing also blocked out any background.

I was lying on a bench that was raised so that my feet were above my head. I used this device to do stomach crunches, and I was getting pretty good at them, if I may say so (and I do say so). Imagine my surprise when, as I took a short breather between sets, I heard a noise, opened my eyes, and found a guy I sort of knew of—one of the jocks, of course—standing beside the bench looking down at me.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I responded. So far it was not shaping up to be a real high-intellect conversation.

“How you doing?” he asked.

“Not bad. You?”

“Not bad.” He paused for a moment, as if searching for something to say. “I’m Jeremy.”

“Mark,” I said, offering my hand. We shook hands. Was that the appropriate thing for two guys to do in the weight room? I had no freaking idea! I hadn’t ever been given the guy handbook to know the proper etiquette for such occasions. But at least what I did seemed to pass the test because he stayed and kept talking with me.

“What’re you doing?” he asked.

“Stomach crunches.”

“Why you got the bench raised like that?” he asked.

“You give it some angle and you have to work harder—gives you more impact from each crunch.”

“Huh. Never thought of that.”

“Yeah, works really well. Want to try it?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said.

I got up off the bench and let him take my place. I was baffled. This guy and I had never shared more than two words in conversation over all the years we’d gone to the same school, and suddenly he was taking exercise advice from me. It was highly suspicious. All kinds of warning bells were going off in my head, but at the same time I couldn’t match those warnings to any particular threat or danger. So far Jeremy was being perfectly reasonable. I still had no idea why he was talking to me, but he was being nice, polite, and making an effort to make conversation. All were things guys typically had trouble doing.

We finished out the period, which only had a few minutes left. When we heard the other guys moving into the locker room to shower and change, he stuck out his hand to shake mine, said, “Thanks,” and then we moved off to join them. That was one of the most unexpected encounters I think I had ever experienced. If anything, I would have thought the guy would try to beat the crap out of me rather than chat me up. I did not for a minute believe that Jeremy didn’t know what I had been doing. He had most likely done the same thing any number of times himself. Very strange, indeed.

Immediately after gym class I was scheduled to help out in the computer lab. It was relatively quiet that afternoon, so I used the time to do some research for a paper I had to write. I was somewhat limited in what I could do at school because the school was too cheap to pay for Internet connectivity. That, plus one of the school board members was a fundamentalist whack job who had wailed about the evils of the big, bad Internet and fought the proposal to put in Internet connectivity tooth and nail. She preached up one side and down the other about the evils of the wild Internet, how all that was there was evil, designed to tempt our children into lives of depraved debauchery.

All her actions did was deprive the kids of this school district from accessing everything in the real world. With no connectivity we had no access to subscription services for research, no way to verify facts, no way to connect with others our own age, no way to promote school activities. She was such a dick.

Toward the end of the period, which was my last of the day, Bill unexpectedly arrived. There was no one else there. It had been quiet all period long, which was fine with me but boring as hell. With a concerned look on his face he said, “I heard you made a new friend this afternoon in gym class.”

“My God, guys gossip worse than a bunch of girls!”

“Duh,” he said with a smile. “What happened? I either heard it wrong or there’s some part I haven’t heard yet.”

I smiled. “I have no idea why, but Jeremy just came up to me in the weight room and started talking me up. It wasn’t a long-winded conversation about anything in particular, but he was asking me about how I was doing, what I was doing, why I had the weight bench arranged the way I did. He tried it the way I had it set up. It was perfectly polite but unexpected. What do you make of it?”

“I’m not entirely sure. Let me think about it for a little while and see if I get any brilliant insight.”

When the bell rang he said, “Let’s get our coats and get out of here.” My mom was busy that afternoon so we had to take the bus. We retrieved our coats and whatever books we needed for that evening and met by the door to go out and catch the bus, my bus that was now his bus too. I liked the sound of that.

While we waited for our bus to arrive, Jeremy appeared by my side. He clearly knew Bill. They had probably done some jock thing together at some point. He looked at me when Bill was talking to somebody else for a second. When Bill turned back he gave Bill a “hey” and a head nod—males were so outgoing and expressive!

Jeremy was a super jock. He had to have heard the rumors going around the school. Everybody had. Was he just being loyal to Bill and watching over me? Did he suddenly want to be my friend? Why? Why? Why? I had so many questions. I just wanted to sit him down and ask him all of those questions.

Bill looked over at us, clearly very confused. With Bill there, Jeremy had strength in numbers, so he stayed and talked with us about trivial stuff for a few minutes while we all waited together. I was shocked to see Joey, the guy Bill had talked with in calculus yesterday, stop as well. I guess two jocks trumped one faggot. “Hey, guys. What’s up?” he asked in our general direction.

More trivial guy talk for a minute, and then thankfully our bus came and Bill and I headed home. We couldn’t talk on the bus. And at home my mom wanted to give us a snack and hear about our day. When she went to start dinner we went into my room—I needed to start calling it our room—and closed the door.

“So, what the hell was going on with Jeremy this afternoon?” I asked as soon as we were safely inside my—no, our—room with the door closed.

“I don’t have a clue.”

“Did you set him up to watch over me?”

“No! I haven’t talked with him for quite a while. I see him around and we’re friendly, but I can’t say we’re friends.”

“Do you think he’s trying to tell me that he’s gay?”

“I have no idea. If he is, I had no hint of it, no clue, nothing. If he is he’s kept it so well hidden that I didn’t have any idea that he was.”

Another moment of quiet. We were simply taking comfort in the presence of the other. I broke the silence. “There are so many stupid and closeted guys in school.”

“Too many,” Bill agreed, but he nodded in agreement to the point.

“We need to get you out of here, Bill,” I said. I couldn’t look at him.

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

“You’re a big man at school. You’ve worked too hard for too many years to get where you are in the pecking order. You being seen talking to me, associating with me, being friendly with me—it’s gonna cause you major trouble. We need to put some distance between us for your safety, for the sake of your reputation.”

“To hell with the ‘reputation’!” he yelled at me. “I don’t give a damn about any of that!
You
are what I care about.
You
are what matters. Who cares about what a bunch of bigots think? Screw ’em. They’re not my friends. They’re all so damned superficial….”

“But they can cause you major grief.”

“I have no doubt. But being separated from you would cause me
more
grief. I’m not going anywhere. If anything, we’re gonna be more visibly together at school. I mean, if this is the game people want to play, then that’s the game I’m gonna play too. And news flash—I’m way better at it than any of them ever dreamed about being.”

My mom called us for dinner, which we ate with a minimum of conversation. Fortunately, my mom and dad were more than able to fill in the quiet. After dinner, my dad brought up something I hadn’t even thought about. He asked Bill when he wanted to go back to his house to pick up his car.

“Won’t my dad be there?”

“No. He’s gone. He won’t be bothering you ever again.”

“You sure you didn’t bury him somewhere back in the woods?” Bill joked to lighten the moment.

“I’m sure. At this time of year we have to use the dump.” Bill laughed with my dad, which was nice. They invited me to go along to pick up Bill’s car, but I opted to stay home and do some reading that I needed to do for school the next day. About an hour later Bill was back, his car was in the driveway, and he had a duffel bag with a few more things with him. He had gone into the house and picked up a few things he wanted.

“Your dad is really gone?” I asked.

“Yeah. He was gone, and it didn’t look like anybody has been there for a couple of days.”

“I wonder if we’ve really seen the last of him,” I said.

We both had homework, so we got to work on it before calling it a day and crawling into bed together. Going to sleep wrapped around your true love was one of the most glorious feelings I think I’d ever experienced.