I was going to talk to Kevin tomorrow. Have him over to my house. Have him in my room. I was going to get this whole thing settled. He’d be here, see how an adult teen lived, hear how mature I was when I spoke to him and clued him in, and he’d get a better idea who I was. He’d see it was dumb for him to be angry at me. I was older, had it all more together that he did, and he’d see that him being mad at me just didn’t make much sense. He had no idea who I was. Well, he’d see for himself. No doubt at all about that.
I’d talk to him, probably have to tell him some stuff I didn’t want to tell him but I’d just get through that and be done with it, then we’d go ahead and talk about him, and I’d find out about all this anger he had directed at me, and he’d get past it. That anger was silly. He was a little boy, and I was an adult, and he’s mad at me all the time? What’s with that, anyway? I guess we’d get that all cleared up, and get whatever the relationship we had straightened out, get it settled where our relative positions were all worked out and things were as they were supposed to be. Maybe he’d even smile again.
Well, that made sense, and I liked looking at it that way. So, why wouldn’t my stomach behave? Why was I nervous, and not a bit sure of myself? I could see how things were supposed to be, but even telling myself all that didn’t help. I simply didn’t feel that way, and telling myself differently didn’t seem to be working nearly as well as it should have. I knew who I was, I had a good idea of who Kevin was, I should be feeling very comfortable with each of us in our separate and very distinct roles, and I wasn’t. At all.
He wanted to hear about my first couple of years in high school. I didn’t want to tell him. That was a bother, telling him that. I supposed I could lie about it, but that didn’t feel right. In a little back corner of my mind that I didn’t use very much, I did sort of want him to hear it, because then he’d really see being mad at me didn’t make much sense. I was just a kid like him, and a good guy. No, no, I mean I’d been just a kid like him back then. Well, I thought I’d been, that he was like I’d been. But that was then and this was now, he’d been feisty and I hadn’t, but I am a good guy and he shouldn’t be mad at a good guy. Finding that out should settle him down. Then maybe he’d like me.
Damn it anyway! Damn it! Why did that thought always have to be lurking around hiding in my head waiting to jump out at me at the worst times? I didn’t want him to like me, just not to hate me, not look daggers at me with all that anger and hate in his eyes. That’s why I was doing this. He should respect me and treat me like he respected me. That’s what we were after here.
No it wasn’t. I wanted him to like me. Arrrrrrggggh! Why was this so confusing? And why did it bother me so much that I wanted him to like me? And why was he hanging around me in gym before he had his stupid accident, anyway?
I wasn’t able to think about anything but this, and Mom wanted me studying and doing homework before band tonight, and then I had to play in the show tonight and I had this on my mind. I was lying on the bed, just thinking about this and I had things to do. I got up and tried to do some homework, but the math seemed like Greek and I’d never studied Greek. My English assignment was about the symbolism in Lord of the Flies. I’d read the story, but trying to answer the questions required me to think back about what I’d read and about the only thing I could remember was there was an island and a bunch of kids, and when I tried to picture the kids, romping around mostly naked, I kept seeing Kevin and it wasn’t working at all. I thought about him being one of the weaker kids yet with his big mouth and because of that some of the bigger kids got angry with him and he was in trouble and I couldn’t help him and I was having a hard time getting the picture out of my head.
I put my clarinet together and played it for a while, and found that worked a little better. I could actually focus on that, mostly. I played through some fingering exercises and did all right on those, but then when I was running through the Weber, I found I’d only been able to play the exercises because I had to concentrate on the music. With the clarinet concerto I was working on, I’d played it enough that I had it mostly memorized, and that meant my mind could wander a little. It began to do that, and I found myself getting way too distracted. After making the same fingering mistake three times in a row on a tricky descending sixteen-note arpeggio, even when I played it at half-tempo, I felt like throwing the clarinet across the room. I was in a thunderous mood. I didn’t throw it, of course. It was a Buffet. You don’t throw Buffets.
What I could do was try to get some of this stuff out of my head. I only knew one really good way to do that. Well, two, actually, but I chose the first. I went to talk to my mom.
◊ ◊
She was in the kitchen, working on dinner. I grabbed some carrots she’d peeled for a salad and took them to the table. She scowled at me and picked up the peeler again. I grinned. Then I stopped when I thought about what I wanted to talk about.
“Mom, Kevin’s coming over tomorrow.”
She was getting more carrots out of the refrigerator. She paused for just a second, then grabbed the bag and took it to the counter. Without turning around, she asked, “How did that happen?”
“We talked at lunch today. He agreed to answer some questions, tell me why he’s angry. I have to tell him some stuff, too. I thought it would be better to do it in private.”
“So he’s not angry with you any more?”
“I don’t know. I can never tell with him, the way his moods jump around for no reason I can understand. He didn’t seem to be angry this afternoon, he was even different from anyway I’d seen from him before, but I’m getting used to that, to him changing all the time. I’m never sure what he’ll be like, one time to the next. But I’ve been able to talk to him a couple times now, briefly, without him being mad.”
“When’s he coming over? Do I need to fix lunch for him?”
“He’ll come over after lunch. One o’clock. But Mom . . . .”
When I didn’t finish my thought, she looked around at me. I was sitting there looking back at her, uncertain what to say. She saw me looking like, well, I don’t know what, and put down the peeler and the carrot she was scraping and came over and sat down next to me.
“Matt?”
“Mom, I’m just so confused. I don’t know what I feel about Kevin. I’ve never felt this way before and it’s upsetting.”
“Felt how? How do you feel?”
“I’m not sure! I’m . . . I’m . . . .” I stopped.
“Matt, are you really so confused you can’t say what you feel? Is it possible you do know what you feel? That maybe you just don’t want to say it out loud? Do you think that maybe you don’t want to admit to yourself what you feel? Could that be it?”
I looked in her eyes. I could see all that huge intelligence there. And compassion and understanding, too.
“Yes,” I said.
“Whatever it is you’re reluctant to say to yourself, remember, you have to be true to yourself, and you’re a good person, and accepting yourself is something you have to do. Do you think you’ve been hiding from it? Is that what’s causing you all this confusion and upsetting you?”
I looked away from her, down at the table. Still looking down, I said, “I think I like him. It’s the only thing that makes sense. And when I think that, all to myself, it feels right. Does that mean I’m gay, Mom? I don’t want to be gay. And I think that means I’m gay.”
“You are who you are, Matt. If you’re gay, then you are. Being attracted to Kevin doesn’t mean you’re gay, it means you find him attractive. Being gay is a lot more than thinking another boy is attractive. Whether you are or aren’t gay is something else besides finding Kevin attractive, it’s a separate thing for you to think about.”
“Do you think I’m gay?”
“Matt, that’s something you have to figure out for yourself.”
“You mean you know?! You’ve already figured me out?! If you have, why haven’t you told me?!”
“I didn’t say that, Matt. Don’t put words in my mouth. I’m your mother; of course I’ve thought about you, a lot. But you have to decide who you are. If you have questions, I’ll try to help you with them. But it isn’t my role to tell you things about yourself that you need to be answering yourself.”
“Why not?”
“Because then you’ll either reject what I tell you because you’re at the age when kids do that, or you’ll accept something I’ve told you and follow that path because it’s easier than working it out for yourself.”
“You’re no help at all.”
“Of course I am. I’m just not going to be the one who decides for you if you’re gay or not.” She grinned at me. Big help that was!
“Do you care?”
“Matt, of course I care. But not the way you might mean that. It’s not a problem with me if you’re gay. Nor your father, either. You should know that. We love you, and your sexual orientation is just part of who you are, just one of the things that make you you. Do you really have to ask me that?”
I thought for a time, then said, “No, I don’t. But you should tell me if I’m gay.” I sounded like a grumpy six-year-old. Even to me.
“No, I shouldn’t. That’s your job, growing up and finding out who you are. But one nice thing to consider: if you’re not ready to answer that question yet, you don’t need to. You’re still a kid, Matt. No matter how hard you try to be an adult, you’re still a kid. Kids don’t have to have an answer to that question. Not till they’re ready.”
“When will that be.”
“You’ll know. When it’s time. You’ll know.”
I stood up and started to go back to my room, then turned around and came back and hugged her. She hugged me back. We held the hug for a while, too. I went back up to my room then, feeling a whole lot better. Which was strange, when you think about it. I’d been upset because I’d been confused about what I was thinking and feeling. And she hadn’t straightened that out at all. Yet I was feeling a whole lot better. Weird.
◊ ◊
The halftime show went well, except for the time when a freshman who was in the southern border of Texas somehow wasn’t paying attention and got so far out of line, I thought he might need a passport to get back to Texas. He realized he was all by himself, south of the border in the middle of us playing Big D, and scurried back to where he was supposed to be, drawing all the eyes in the stadium to him, I imagined. He must have felt like a complete dork, and I was so glad it wasn’t me.
I spoke to Becky afterwards as we were putting our stuff away. She looked down at my crotch and laughed. I did too and still blushed, even though there had been no boner tonight. Nothing was sore, either. I told her Kevin was coming over to my house tomorrow to talk. She told me to call her afterwards, or come over. I said it would probably be too private for that. She hit me on the arm and told me I was full of shit and if I didn’t call or come over, The Wrath of Becky would result in the Death of Matt.
My arm hurt all the way home. I think she was serious.
◊ ◊
I was really nervous, waiting for Kevin. I was terribly conflicted between wanting him to like me and feeling that was completely irrelevant. All I wanted was him not to hate me. But I still felt conflicted between wanting to know the reason for his behavior towards me and my not wanting to tell him my background. I wanted to know why he’d said his life was shitty. And I didn’t really want to think about why I responded to him the way I did. I knew I shouldn’t be nervous about a younger boy coming to my house, but I was, I was worried about how I’d act, and that added to my nervousness.
I couldn’t help myself. After I’d eaten lunch, I went back up to my room and looked it over. I’d straightened it up last night, and then done it again this morning, and all the while I’d been telling myself to stop, I didn’t need to do any of this, and then kept on doing it. Now I looked at it and wondered if it was too neat, and what he might read into that. The room was fine; I was a mess.
I went back down stairs and looked out the window. It was still twenty till one. He wouldn’t be coming for a while yet. So I sat down and grabbed a magazine, but kept looking out the window anyway.
My mom walked into the room with a basket of laundry.
“You’re not going to fold that in here, are you?”
“I always do. I watch TV while I’m doing it. You know that. I have a whole pile of your boxers to fold.”
“But Mom . . .”
“What?”
“Mom!”
She laughed. She actually laughed. There are times mothers can be brutally cruel, and at those times teenage boys can totally lose their sense of humor and hate them with a loathing that is unspeakable. She walked over to me and ruffled my hair, which I’d spent a long time getting right. I pushed her hand away and scowled at her. Her laugh became a very sympathetic smile, and she said, “Maybe I’ll fold this in my room today. Remember, we’re going out later.” Then she picked up the basket and headed down the hallway to her room.
I jumped up and ran to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, then grabbed my brush to fix my hair again. I was trying to get it right when the doorbell rang.
“Shit!” I said, then yelled, “I got it!” took one more quick stroke at my hair, decided it was hopeless, and trotted, then walked, to the door.
Kevin was waiting on the doorstep, his bicycle leaning against one of the bushes we have guarding the front steps. He was wearing a dark blue polo shirt and light beige cargo shorts and had on sneakers and ankle socks. His long, light blond hair seemed to shine from an inner light as the sun backlit it. I felt something in my stomach, looking at him, standing in my doorway. My mouth was suddenly dry, and my heart began beating faster than it had been.
He looked into my face, and I could see some nervousness in his eyes. Nothing like I was feeling, but some. Even though I wanted to prolong the moment, to simply look at him rather than have to endure what would come next, I forced myself to speak. “Hi, Kevin. Please come in.”
That wasn’t really what I wanted to say. But then, I didn’t really want to say what I wanted to say. I didn’t want to feel what I was feeling, but there was nothing I could do about that. I hoped I didn’t look as confused and nervous as I felt.
I stepped back a little and he walked in. Then he stopped and looked at me, and I looked back, and the unsure-of-myself feeling I’d been suffering suddenly doubled. I didn’t really want to tell him what he wanted to know, what he’d come to find out, and I wasn’t sure just how to avoid it. We weren’t friends so there was that barrier to be worked around, he was younger than I was, and smaller, and I wasn’t the most social creature who ever inhabited the planet, either.
“Uh, I suppose we should go to my room.” I sounded very tentative. I was very tentative.
He was looking at me, and I saw a very subtle change in him. He’d looked nervous when he was standing outside; now he was inside, I was sort of fumbling around, being me, and I thought I saw his shoulders lose a bit of their tension. He seemed to relax very slightly. I hoped it wasn’t because I was being such a dork, but had to think that was it. He could see my nervousness, and it seemed to relax him some. I’d tried so hard to project an image of maturity to him all the time I’d known him. So very hard. In gym class especially. I hoped I wasn’t blowing it now. If he thought I was just as uncertain of myself as he was supposed to be, he’d lose all respect for me.
“Could you show me around first?” His voice sounded like it had yesterday, very normal for a young teen. But looking at him, I thought I saw some of the life he’d had in his eyes when I first met him, a life that hadn’t been there since the accident.
“Sure. I’ll give you the grand tour,” I said, as though the house was anything special. I felt some relief. Anything to prolong the time before I had to perform vivisection on myself.
Actually, our house was pretty nice. My mother worked out of our home, but that was so she could be home for me when I left for school in the morning and got home in the afternoon. She had a pretty full practice, as many kids as she could handle. She made a lot of money, I guessed, and Dad, even though he was a public school teacher, had been in the system for a number of years and made a decent salary, too. I didn’t know how much either of them made; I never asked and they never spoke about it, but we lived in an upper-end development of very impressive homes, both my parents had very nice cars, and I had everything I wanted. I didn’t really ask for much. I had wanted a very good clarinet, and had got one. Actually, I had three, the original one I’d first started on, and then the new Buffet I’d got a couple years ago when I told them I was serious about the instrument. When we’d bought it, we’d taken the advice of my teacher and bought both a B-flat and an A clarinet, and they’d come in a double case . I’d kept the beginner instrument I’d started on and that was the one I had always taken to marching band practice back when I played clarinet there. There was no way I’d play the Buffet outdoors where it might get rained on, or take the chance some kid might trip over me and I’d fall down on it.
I showed Kevin the ground floor: the living room, formal dining room, large kitchen with what Mom called our professional quality and size appliances, the kitchen nook where we usually ate, the game room where the pool table was, Mom’s study and office, then the backyard with the patio and pool and basketball area. We didn’t have a tennis court, so I couldn’t show him that.
I showed him the basement, which was broken up into several finished rooms and he looked very closely at the exercise equipment when we were in the workout area. “I wish I had this,” he said wistfully as he looked at my weight bench. “I’d work out all the time if I did. Do you use it a lot?”
“When I can. At least three or four times a week. I’m trying to build myself up, and should do it more, but with homework and music practice and now marching band, I sometimes don’t do it as much as I should.”
“I couldn’t do it anyway, now,” he said, and raised his cast a little to show what he meant.
I immediately wondered if he was trying to make me feel guilty, but as he didn’t look at me when he said it but instead wandered over to the treadmill, I didn’t think he’d said it for any reason other than that he was saying what he felt.
“Hey, this is neat. Can you turn it on and show me?”
I smiled at his enthusiasm. I got on the treadmill, turned the setting to a slow walk, then hit the ON button. It started, I started, and Kevin watched.
“How fast does it go?”
“Pretty fast,” I said, and turned it up, not to the top, but a lot higher. I had to jog pretty fast to
stay with it. I turned it off after only a few steps.
“Neat! This stuff is great.”
“When your wrist is healed, maybe you could come over, we could use it together.”
He looked at me and gave me a funny look that didn’t include a smile, and didn’t answer.
I paused, not knowing what else to say, but he just kept looking around, and so I took him to another part of the basement and showed him where we had a wet bar and a room set up for partying, with a dance floor of polished hardwood surrounded by some small tables, sort of set up like a night club. I showed him how we could regulate the lights, demonstrated the sound system, and he seemed interested.
“So you throw parties down here a lot for your friends?”
I guess I should have anticipated that, but I hadn’t. And as was usual for me, when I was uncomfortable, I became tongue-tied. And when I become tongue-tied, I frequently blush. I did not want to blush in front of this little kid.
“Uh, that’s all we have to see down here. Why don’t we go up? You want anything to drink before we go up to my room?”
He looked at me with a strange look on his face, then didn’t press the point about the parties, and said, “Yeah, a can of something, anything, would be great, if that’s okay.”
We went up to the kitchen. We had two refrigerators, and I took him to the one with the soft drinks in it and showed him what we had. I was pleasantly surprised when he chose a Dr Pepper. I took one for me, too, and then told him, “I was thinking we could talk in my room, but we could sit outside on the patio if you’d rather.”
“Your room is fine with me.”
“Okay, let’s go up, then.” And I took him upstairs. My room was fairly large, and I have a queen-sized bed in it. When we got there, he wandered around, looking at my stuff. Earlier, when I was talking about my Mom and Dad making a pretty good living and I said I had everything I wanted and didn’t ask for much, I guess that statement could be taken a couple ways. What I meant was, I had some stuff, but it didn’t seem excessive to me, and every time a new game or piece of technology came out, I didn’t run to my parents and beg for it. A lot of kids seemed to have a lot more stuff than I did. I didn’t have a cell phone, for instance. A lot of kids were beginning to get them now.
Anyway, Kevin looked at my TV and game system and DVD player and what movies and games I had, and while he was doing that, I sat down at my computer desk and turned the chair so I could watch him. He seemed comfortable. A lot more than I did. We were nearing the time I’d have to talk to him, and I didn’t want to do it. It was going to make me look like a loser to him, and this year I’d tried so hard to look like so much more than that. I thought again about lying to him, but something inside me rebelled at the thought. Maybe it was remembering what Mom had told me, that I had to be honest with myself, not try to be someone I wasn’t, trust myself and believe in myself. Making up a past for Kevin to hear would be violating all these things, and if I did that, he’d be learning about someone that wasn’t me, and as much as that might be safer for me, I didn’t want that. If he was going to see me, I wanted it to be the real me. I wanted him to like me. Me.
And I suddenly realized, without all this vacillating I’d been doing, that that was indeed what I wanted. I wanted him to like me. I knew I’d been trying to talk myself out of that because of all it meant, but the truth was there, and I’d been avoiding it. I wanted him to like me. And I was afraid if he heard all about me, he’d reject me. That was my great fear. I was afraid that if he knew me, he’d simply turn away and disappear. And we’d reached the point in time where I needed to let him see who I was. It was now or never. I wanted so badly to not do this, but I wasn’t going to chicken out, even if it cost me his respect. My Mom had convinced me, even if I hadn’t realized it, that being honest with myself and people I cared about was necessary if I was going to be the guy I wanted to be.