Going the Distance (30 page)

One of the assistant coaches was holding a clipboard and checked off my name when I introduced myself.

“Monroe?” he asked. “Yeah, you need to go see that lady,” he said, pointing to a middle-aged woman sitting on a folding chair, looking bored.

I was going to ask why, but he just went back to checking people in, so I wandered over to her. “Hi, I was told I needed to see you?”

She looked up at me. “You Pitman or Monroe?”

“Monroe,” I answered, confused.

She reached down and handed me a plastic cup with a cover on top. “I’m going to need you to go in there and fill this up,” she said, pointing to the building behind her.

I looked back at the bus and saw guy after guy getting on after they checked in, no problem. I looked down at the cup and realized I hadn’t driven away from anything; I’d been driving toward a whole new set of problems.

I
T
’
S
FUNNY
how stories turn out.

For those of you keeping score, this story was started before
Tales from Foster High
. I had begun to dabble in Danny’s story based on a couple of friends I knew who were struggling to be gay and on a sports team. I had no idea what I was going to do with it—again, this was before I ever decided to submit Brad and Kyle’s story at all. It’s one of those things writers do, and it bugs the hell out of other people. We start stories and then put them away, never to finish.

Right now my friend Gina is reading this and growling because of a
Doctor Who
story I owe her.

So instead I wrote
Tales from Foster High
and then
Lords of Arcadia
, and before I knew it, I had books to write. Once started,
Foster High
had to be finished. The moment I realized the arc, there was no way I could not write those books, and thankfully people read them. I wrote
Lords of Arcadia
as a palate cleanser of sorts. I needed Nine Realms and changelings to get high school boys off my mind.

Wow, that sounded way dirtier than I meant it to.

So working on Danny’s story seemed redundant to me. I was writing a story about high school kids who were struggling with their identities; writing another at the same time was courting disaster. And then
151 Days
came around.

As I was writing it, I realized that I had Brad meeting a guy at A&M, talking to him about being gay, and then making this choice on whether to go to school there or not. Didn’t think about it—I mean, it was a guy in a story Brad was going to talk to. No big deal.

And then it became a big deal.

Danny, the one in my head, politely pointed out that
he
wanted to play basketball at A&M, and if he was at the school at the same time Brad went to go check it out, couldn’t he be that guy? I realized, why not? I mean, it was a great way to make a nothing character suddenly someone, and I got to add Danny, who I really, really like. So I handed the rough draft over to the friends who read it for me before I submit it to be published, and they all asked the same thing.

Who was that Danny kid?

I explained quickly, and they nodded and then asked, “So where is his story?”

To which I gave the worst answer a writer can ever give.

“It’s half-done on my hard drive.”

You can guess from there what happened, and so after writing
151 Days
I went back and took Danny’s story out and began to write some more.

There are three books in this series: the one you are holding now; the next one, which is him in college; and the last one, which is him as a young adult. This I promise you, because I know some people don’t like to invest their time in a book series unless they know it’s going somewhere.

This is definitely going somewhere.

So now you know.

T
HE
NEXT
thing I want to talk about is A&M, the university.

As with
151 Days,
I thought about making a fictional college for Danny to attend and for Brad to check out. I did this because I didn’t want to paint the actual college in a bad light as being homophobic. They are not, and anything in these pages is purely fictional and has nothing to do with the real A&M.

In fact, A&M has an openly gay diver named Amini Fonua who holds two school records there. So please do not read this and go, “Oh well, I knew Texas was intolerant and homophobic,” because that’s not true.

Well, it is true, but it’s true for the entire United States.

There are horrible people everywhere who think that being gay is a sin, that gay people are abominations, and that we’re all going to hell for it. They all do not wear cowboy hats, trust me. Not everyone in San Francisco is liberal and tolerant, and not everyone in Texas is a red-meat-eating, gun-toting, homophobic Republican. This book is not here to make that stereotype. It’s here to tell you that if you have to judge someone, and please don’t, judge them on their words and actions and not what popular media tells you they are.

I know many Aggies, and they are awesome people. Really, they are. They smile at you and say howdy—it’s a very cool thing—and to think that because they come from Texas they automatically think a specific way is like thinking all gay people have to be sexual deviants. It’s an assumption that does no one good in the end. So there, end of lesson. The more you know and all that. Knowing is half the battle. This message was brought to you by the Kyle Stilleno Foundation to Minimize the Number of Asshats in the World.

John Goode

November 2014

J
OHN
G
OODE
is a member of the class of ’88 from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, specializing in incantations and spoken spells. At the age of fourteen, he proudly represented District 13 in the 65th Panem games, where he was disqualified for crying uncontrollably before the competition began. After that he moved to Forks, Washington, where against all odds he dated the hot, incredibly approachable werewolf instead of the stuck-up jerk of a vampire, but was crushed when he found out the werewolf was actually gayer than he was. After that he turned down the mandatory operation everyone must receive at sixteen to become pretty, citing that everyone pretty was just too stupid to live, before moving away for greener pastures. After falling down an oddly large rabbit hole, he became huge when his love for cakes combined with his inability to resist the commands of sparsely worded notes, and was finally kicked out when he began playing solitaire with the Red Queen’s 4th armored division. By eighteen he had found the land in the back of his wardrobe, but decided that thinly veiled religious allegories were not the neighbors he desired. When last seen, he had become obsessed with growing a pair of wings after discovering Fang’s blog and hasn’t been seen since.

Or he is this guy who lives in this place and writes stuff he hopes you read.

Twitter: @fosterhigh

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TalesFromFosterHigh

Tales from Foster High

Tales from Foster High: Book One

By John Goode

Kyle Stilleno is the invisible student, toiling through high school in the middle of Nowhere, Texas. Brad Greymark is the baseball star of Foster High. When they bond over their mutual damage during a night of history tutoring, Kyle thinks maybe his life has changed for good. But the promise of fairy-tale love is a lie when you’re gay and falling for the most popular boy in school. A coming of age story in the same vein of John Hughes,
Tales from Foster High
shows an unflinching vision of the ups and downs of teenage love and what it is like to grow up gay.

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RESS

End of the Innocence

Tales from Foster High: Book Two

By John Goode

Kyle Stilleno is no longer the invisible boy, and he doesn’t quite know how he feels about it. On one hand, he now has a great boyfriend, Brad Greymark, and a handful of new friends, and even a new job. On the other hand, no one screamed obscenities at him in public when he was invisible.

No one expected him to become a poster boy for gay rights, either—at least not until Kyle stepped out of the closet and into the limelight. But there are only a few months of high school left, and Kyle doubts he can make a difference.

With Christmas break drawing closer, Kyle and Brad are changing their lives to include each other. While the trials are far from over, they have their relationship to lean on. Others are not so lucky. One of their classmates needs their help—but Kyle and Brad’s relationship may be too new to survive the strain.

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151 Days

Tales from Foster High: Book Three

By John Goode

With just 151 days left until the school year ends, Kyle Stilleno is running out of time to fulfill the promise he made and change Foster, Texas, for the better. But Kyle and his boyfriend, Brad Greymark, have more than just intolerance to deal with. Life, college, love, and sex have a way of distracting them, and they’re realizing Foster is a bigger place than they thought. When someone from their past returns at the worst possible moment, graduation becomes the least of their worries.

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