Memorizing You (20 page)

The only one appearing to not appreciate this seeming perverse-relationship was Connor. The self-ordained sex god of our school manifested the body language of a man in full-blown jealous disgust and anger. It was only because of his relationship with Ryan on the team that he seemed to be able to control his tongue. Ryan had no difficulty with Connor. He rarely paid much attention to him. But Connor had a bone up his butt about Ryan. And the concurring opinion was that it began and ended with Rosemary.

It was the week right after school started that the thing with Connor came to a strange head. Ryan got starting quarterback. Connor was second-string. It was unexpected. Even Ryan didn’t anticipate it. Connor was a madman on the field. An unbeatable force. A lot of the members of the team had thought it had been a misstep on the coach’s part.

But they, of course, had been Connor’s friends.

Our team had won a game against Southwest. Or, more succinctly, Ryan had won the game. He’d been unstoppable. The crowd cheered his name and number. His father paced the bleachers, letting everyone know it was his son that was the champion of the game. Rosemary and I were just as pumped.

I met him in the locker room to collect his gear. I knew he had a lot of celebration to still go through. Connor had caught a glimpse of us there. I’d only touched his hand. If I’d been a teammate, it would have meant nothing. But I wasn’t. And that meant a hell of a lot more in Connor’s eyes. When we saw him, he turned away quickly. Was out of the room in a flash. I grabbed the gear and began the walk to Ryan’s dad’s car.

I heard the tromping footfalls behind me all the way from the gymnasium. I knew the heavy body that made that thudding sound. And I knew it was trouble. The bad feeling permeated the early autumn air. The leaves under my feet crunched fast. His crunched faster. I tried to move steadily ahead of him. But as I did, he com$1Jas the pensated.

Just as I reached the car, hands gripped my collar and spun me around. No surprise. The hostile face of Connor breathed fire into mine. Lines much older than he owned were etched in his flesh. Flames blew out the whites of his eyes. Teeth ground. There was one undeniable truth in his complexion. He did not like me. His white knuckles glared in my vision. “I got something to say to you, faggot. Don’t try to run away from me.” Spit blasted against my face. “You guys think you’re fooling all of us hanging around with Rosemary and all, but you ain’t fooling nobody. We’ve seen your cutesy-pie heart necklaces and the way you’re always together, using her to make us think you’re not. But we know. We
know
.

“You’re nothing but a couple of queers. And I don’t know who alls dick you guys sucked to make him quarterback, but this ain’t gonna stand. Fairies don’t get to suck their way to the top, and your cock-sucking buddy is gonna go down. You hear that?”

“Hey, sweetie!” It was Rosemary’s voice. Oddly lilting. Strangely menacing.

Connor shifted to look at her. His face crumpled in the next second as I saw the toe of her boot catch his crotch straight on. He tried to keep to his feet, but couldn’t. His knees struck the asphalt of the parking lot. Air expulsed.

She kicked him again. Then, she pushed him to the ground. It all happened in a matter of seconds.

“You bigoted piece of pig-shit!” she screamed, kneeling beside him. Her face was next to his, looking like a devil Halloween mask. If the devil was a girl.

Veins had popped in relief all over his face. Big and blue and pulsating. He was gagging, sucking air. She smacked him in the face with the back of her hand. The welt was the perfect shape of her fingers.

“You wanna play that queer game, buddy? Do you? Do you really?” She was centimeters from his face. “Here’s what we’ll do if you want to play that game. You open your ugly, sick mouth of yours again, I will tell everyone I left you because you got drunk and I caught you offering to give my guys both a blow job. How’s that sound? And I’ll be graphic. They will believe.”

She grabbed his jaw. $ aI my“Do you want to play that game?”

He turned to his side, out of her grasp, an earlier dinner of burger and fries spewed suddenly from his mouth. He shook his head repeatedly. He muttered unintelligible words.

“Good,” she said, standing up. “I’m glad we can say we mutually broke up because it just wasn’t working.”

I threw the gear in the car and we left him there. Rosemary walked like a triumphant crusader.

If one ever has had a doubt about what true friendship meant, if there was ever an uncertainty to how a friend should stand against the odds for another, all anyone had to do was witness an episode of courage like this.

I was speechless. For fifteen minutes, I was speechless. We sat at the end of the bleachers, away from all the activities while I tried to absorb what had just transpired. Rosemary bummed a cigarette off a passerby, and we shared a smoke. Her fingers shook as she handed it to me. I could only imagine the adrenalin surge coursing through her veins.

Finally, I said, “Okay. Wow. You’re Wonder Woman. Why did I not know this?”

“I’m not Wonder Woman. I just don’t understand that Neanderthal attitude. The world has enough troubles and lies and pain.” She reached over and touched my leg. The cigarette jittered in her fingers. “Why people would try to hurt people who can actually find love in this mess makes no sense to me at all. You have to be pretty sub-human to be against what we’re all looking for in life. That’s something to bust your knuckles for.”

My eyes saw her beauty. Completely. “You’re very special, girl.”

“You made me believe, David,” she said, voice just a shadow. “You guys found love inside all these obstacles. That gives hope to all of us with far less to overcome. Do you know how powerful that is?”

“So why did you break up with Connor?” I knew I was prying. But I had to know why.

“Five minutes or five years version?” she asked, a sarcastic edge to her voice. “Okay, five minutes. I experienced my first love with you. You made me see myself differently. Made me want to be something different. I was transported from the boring life I lived to the one I imagined with you. I would have given everything because you became my everything. It was a revelation about myself, David. We all define it differently in our own heads. But it’s a rapturous moment to know how wonderfully strong our feeling can become for someone other than ourselves. How we can become entwined with another.” She stood. “Can we walk?”

We walked out into the football field that was still full of chucks and holes from the game. She suddenly dropped, sat yoga-style, and pulled me down to join her.

“When what happened with us happened, I felt like shit. Lower than shit…” I deemed it necessary in interject my apology again.

She waved it away. “We know why. There’s no apology needed there. It’s just one of those things that pushes us from here to there. And it pushed me into thinking I needed to prove something about myself. My value, I guess. I don’t know what. But Connor came along, and people made me feel like he was important, and that I’d be something better and different if I was with him. Except…that I wasn’t. I was a number to him like someone waiting in line at the delicatessen to buy some Pastrami.”

Her eyes twinkled. She searched for my hand and found it. “The night of Ryan’s party when I heard you two in the garden, I learned more about myself in five minutes than I’ve ever known. Love doesn’t happen because you find the right bricks and cement to build it. Love really is…pure magic. It comes from”—she gestured toward the heavens—”out there. And it falls like pixie dust wherever it wants. And when it does…you can fly.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

My sophomore year was like the very first time in my life that I believed I was coming together as a person. A definable person. What they termed “finding yourself.” They say to be sure of that, you must be able to close your eyes and have a very clear vision of yourself. Be able to see yourself from head to toe, and to know yourself internally. I was so much closer to that than a year ago. I wasn’t trying to be what others expected. anyone who thought theyd told me

I wasn’t trying to reshape myself to be something that conformed. That year, I came back different. Stronger, more self-assured. I looked different. Thanks to the influence of Judy and her friends, and thanks to Rosemary, who actually gave me a coordinated fashion sense that didn’t look like it had been put together at a Goodwill.

It was the first year that people began to notice me. At first, I’d thought it had been my imagination. Mostly because no one had ever paid attention to me before. So when I caught the first couple of eyes on me, I was sure they were either looking at someone else, or my fly was undone. By the fourth time, I quit checking my fly. I began checking the mirror. I had made some major changes physically as well. Besides the new hairstyle, I’d filled out. The workouts, the protein shakes, and the tan had remodeled me.

My shoulders looked broad and sculpted. I had a chest now, and arms that were no longer spindly. My biceps filled my shirt. My legs were thicker, and I had an ass that I could show off in a pair of jeans.

Girls smiled at me in the hallway, and guys checked me out when I was changing in the gym’s locker room. Oh, not in the way I would check out guys undressing. They were checking me out in comparison. The way guys look at bodybuilding books, dreaming of the way they’d like to look. By the middle of the school year, I had girls from every class asking me out on dates. Thankfully, Rosemary was there to make them think I was already romantically engaged. It was all very new and flattering. Rosemary found it entertaining.

We had no more difficulty with Connor. He kept his distance from both of us. He barely talked to Ryan during practice or the games. His other teammates put it down to rivalry.

I had my first taste of hero worship: a young bag-boy at the Tomboy Supermarket. Every time I came in to shop, he’d follow me through the aisles like a trained puppy. He’d stare without blinking as he bagged my groceries. And I’d catch him doing the sideward turn, pay-no-attention-as-I-rearrange-my-crotch move. His reaction was always more extreme if I wore shorts and a tank. I could only imagine what fantasies he used me for, late at night, under his sheets. It’s what I called an ego-tickler.

But my biggest change during my sophomore year was that I was madly, head-over-heels in love. And that made the most difference of all. Our appetites for each other remained insatiable. But it was like playing tag between our schedules. Because of my work and his practice, we hadn’t been able to see each other for three days. The sexual frustration had built in us to the point of lunacy. We were determined to do something about anyone who thought theyowas the it by the weekend.

When Saturday came, I threw one of my jobs into the hands of one of the retirees my dad had hired, and high-tailed it to Ryan’s. He was waiting for me on the front porch, drinking an ice tea. He sat down the glass and we dashed to the barn.

We were barely through the door before we had kicked ourselves out of our shoes, and began tearing the shirts off each other. We scurried up the ladder to the loft. To the bundle of blankets laying at the corner near the front. He undid my shorts. I undid his. We both tasted of sweat and eagerness. The first course of each other was over in a matter of minutes. We laughed at the quickness. The second course was more leisurely and refined.

“I didn’t want to touch myself for the past two days because I thought I’d explode,” I admitted to him.

“I know. It’s crazy,” he said, pulling his shorts back on. “Before we’d done it, I don’t remember ever wanting, or needing anything so badly. I mean I would just whack-off and be fine. But this is like being a junkie. I couldn’t wait for you to get here. My balls were actually beginning to hurt.”

I was pulling my shorts on as well. I could see our shoes, socks and shirts on the floor below us. “Shut up. You’ll get me going again, and I have to get back to work.”

He bent over and licked my nipple.

“Nope!” I protested. “I left a senior citizen doing my job. I gotta get back.” We scampered back down the ladder. I slipped back into my socks and shoes. I was reaching for my shirt when his hand swept to the floor. He ran out the door with it. I ran after.

“Ryan. Stop. Seriously. I have to get back to work.” I grabbed him by the arms, tried to wrench the shirt free. He was laughing and whooping like a brat.

That was when I saw a recognizable shadow from the porch. Ryan was pulling me into him, when I grasped his forearms stiffly and held him away. He looked at me oddly at first. Then his eyes followed mine where his father stood on the porch. He had a drink in his hand. His posture was rigid. The blood in my veins ran cold as he turned and walked back into the house without saying a word.$ tabley fy

Ryan let go of my shirt. I took it and slipped it on. We just looked at each other. The terror we just experienced didn’t need words. It was long after this incident that Ryan informed me his dad had hired a professional coach to take charge of his training. An old former linebacker from Mizzou in the forties. He owned his own small gym in Maplewood in a storefront of what used to be a Thom McAn shoe store. My workouts with Ryan had been replaced. Ryan said his dad had done it so he would take his training more seriously. I had reservations about his real motives. I asked him if his dad had said anything to him about that day, or about me? He told me he hadn’t. I expressed my feelings to Rosemary. She agreed with me. Ryan’s dad was a smart man and would do anything to protect his investment in his son’s future. I had a feeling that included gradually weeding me out. That filled me with a certain amount of angst.

Ryan hated his trainer. Bruce was his name. He was a short man, as broad as he was tall. Balding, sun-crisp. Hair growing from places it shouldn’t, like shoulders and back. Ryan said he smelled like cooked onions all the time. Body odor. His gym was filled with blockheads like Bruce. Strutting, belching, and farting gorillas.

At Ryan’s games, his old man would try to put as many people as possible between himself and me on the bleachers. He refused to acknowledge me, even when I spoke directly to him. That, more or less, confirmed my suspicions.