Growing Pains

Chapter 2

I stopped at Mr. Montgomery’s desk after class. He was used to me being last out of the room but not me standing in front of his desk. I usually lurked by the door, peeking out to see when the halls were emptying before making my foray out. There was extra time scheduled between second and third periods. Almost all teenagers seem to need frequent snacks during the day to remain alive, and so we had several nutrition breaks to keep us from revolting. I had time to talk to Mr. Montgomery. Today, I wasn’t peeking out the door. Instead, I was confronting him.

He was looking at me, waiting for me to speak, and I was waiting for the room to clear. When it had, I didn’t hesitate.

“Mr. Montgomery, I need a new partner. I can’t… I won’t work with Tanner.”

He met my eyes again. I had no problem meeting his. I might get bullied, but that was because I was gay and small, not because I was shy or timid. I was glad he was looking at me. I hoped he could see my conviction.

“We need to talk about this, Trip.”

Mr. Montgomery was one of those guys who used our first names or nicknames. Mrs. McKinley always called us Mr. So-and-So and Miss Such-and-Such. I was Trip Schroder, and he used first names most of the time and last names only when he was angry.

“Okay. No problem. But this needs to be changed, talk or no talk.”

He nodded. “I need to hear your reasons. I spent a lot of time making up these pairings. I have reasons for each of my assignments. I won’t lightly consider making a change. It would mean making several rearrangements, and I don’t wish to do that. So, you have the floor. Convince me of your need.”

Again, no problem. “You probably know I’m gay. Everyone knows I’m gay. Even if I hadn’t come out, my mannerisms would still speak for themselves. Nothing I can do or even want to do anything about. I am who I am and am happy with that. Everyone in school should be allowed to be themselves as long as they don’t infringe on anyone else’s rights. But, as you can imagine, I’ve been getting my fair share of bullying since I started here in the fall. It’s been two weeks now, and since my father got involved, it’s been better, but not good. I hate getting up and coming to school in the morning knowing what I’ll be facing.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that, Trip. But what does that have to do with your partnership with Tanner?”

I think I scowled, but his expression didn’t change, so maybe I didn’t. Either way, I had more talking to do. Convincing more than just talking, I guessed.

“Not everyone here acts like the bad ones do,” I said. “I haven’t had any problem with any girl. And most of the boys just ignore me, which is fine with me. The ones I used to be friends with… well, yeah, that hurts, but I’ve gotten accustomed to it by now, and if that’s how they want to be, they weren’t real friends anyway. The ones who go out of their way to be mean, it’s mostly jocks and the rougher kids, the, well, you know, guys you can tell like to cause trouble just by looking at them. The loud ones you’ve had to deal with in class, the ones you’ve kicked out. Mostly jocks. And Tanner? He’s the biggest jock in school. On all the teams. The star athlete. Idolized by both boys and girls. He has an image to maintain. He’s not going to want to work with me, the gay kid, and I certainly don’t want to work with him, the fascist. In fact, I won’t.”

Having Mr. Montgomery’s eyes steady on me was a bit disconcerting, but my emotions were up, and I could deal with it. I stopped, having made my case, but not sure he’d entirely bought my argument or the depth of my feelings.

“Has Tanner been one of the guys who’s given you trouble?”

I shook my head. “No, but he hangs with guys that do. I don’t see him around much in the halls and this is the only class I have where we’re together. But the kids he’s with, I stay away from those guys outside. So, the fact he’s hasn’t messed with me probably has more to do with propinquity than anything else.”

I could see his eyes grow a little wider, and then he tried not to grin. Grinning would have been bad, a mistake, because it would have given me a chance to tell him he wasn’t taking this seriously and that it was a very serious matter to me. In fact, I’d used that specific word on purpose, thinking he’d have to grin or laugh, and I’d have made my point that he didn’t care whether I was bullied or not, and then he’d have to make the change I was demanding to prove that wasn’t true.

I might be gay, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be a bit devious, a bit underhanded. We all have our ways.

Mr. Montgomery didn’t take the bait. He didn’t grin and say, “Propinquity?” and then laugh or raise his eyebrows. He held himself in check and said, “You understand, don’t you, that stereotyping people is simply wrong? You’re part of a minority that has had to put up with negative stereotyping for ages. Now you’re doing the same thing. You’re tarring all jocks with the same brush. That isn’t fair to Tanner, and it isn’t fair of you.”

I didn’t know how to answer that, so I remained mum.

He didn’t. “What I’m going to do is put your request on hold. I’m going to make a request of my own. Meet with Tanner. Have a work session with him. That should tell you who he is. If, after that, you can tell me honestly that he’s a homophobe and a bully, that you’re scared of him and you can’t in good conscience work with him, then I’ll talk to him and see if what you’re saying is true, and then, and only then, I’ll not require you two to work together.” He paused, stared at me and said, “Tell me if that’s unfair of me.”

I opened my mouth, then shut it. Then opened it again. “If he’s with his buddies, how am I supposed to approach him?”

“Easy,” he said, and this time he didn’t repress the grin. “He doesn’t seem to be the shy sort. Let him approach you.”

≈ ≈ ≈

I was eating lunch where I always did—by myself at one of the smaller tables on the edge of the room. I was the only boy in the entire school who ate by himself. That might have been partly my fault, but then again, I was also the only boy who was out. I might have been able to sit with some other boys had I tried, but the thought of being told no, being rejected in front of all onlookers, had intimidated me, so I’d self-exiled myself. It was okay with me. I liked to read; reading and drawing were about all I was good at. At lunch, I could eat and read at the same time. Reading meant virtually leaving the cafeteria with all its judgments and escaping into another world for a time. I was reading a science-fiction novel at the moment, but I read all sorts and types of books, many of them high-school or even college-level ones. Perhaps that’s where ‘propinquity’ had come from when I’d needed it.

Anyway, I was eating lunch that day and wondering how Kaylam was going to escape from the reptilian droids—this author wouldn’t have been caught dead using a word like ‘propinquity’—when a voice asked, “Mind if I sit with you?”

I looked up to see Tanner Booth standing by my table. Looming might be a better description. He was at least a foot taller than I was, and he was big all over. Shoulders, neck, biceps, thighs—all over. Maybe that’s what made him such a good jock; he was larger than anyone else in our class, as large as the ninth graders, and larger than most of them. But he was more than that. I’d seen him playing basketball and soccer. He was well-coordinated, lighter on his feet than you’d expect from just looking at his bulk, and he got by with agility as much as brute strength.

But he had that, too, and intimidated whomever he was playing against by size as much as anything else.

Okay, I should make it clear what I mean when I say he is big. I’m small. I’m twelve years old, like most incoming seventh graders, but only weigh seventy-one pounds and stand four-feet, five-inches tall. I might be the smallest boy in my grade, though I wasn’t all that short for my age and wasn’t all that much shorter than several other kids. To me, though, all the other kids looked big. When I say Tanner was big, I was comparing him to me and to other seventh graders as well. I didn’t know his height and weight but guessed he was at least a full foot taller than I was and certainly weighed over one hundred pounds. You know: big.

I realized I was staring and not speaking. “Sure,” I said and then wondered what I was supposed to do next. I was enjoying the book and did want to know if Kaylam escaped with all appendages intact. Those giant pincers sounded menacing! Kaylam was a secondary character, a friend of the hero, Wys, and could easily be forfeited at this point. So, there was that, but also now a looming presence across from me. Probably prudence lay in paying more attention to him than the book. I closed it.

“I’m Tanner,” he said and didn’t extend a hand to be shook because we didn’t do that.

“I’m Trip,” I said. Then shut up.

He was looking me over. Well, the top part of me; the rest was hidden by the table. What he had to look at wasn’t much. I had dark brown hair, very dark, worn slightly messy because everyone did, though I thought that, left to my own devices, I’d probably have brushed and combed it. Was wanting to be neat because I was gay? I didn’t know. But I had messy, almost-black hair, medium-brown eyes—eyes that might have shown intelligence or sparkled with an inner light, but I had no idea about that—a forgettable sort of average face with clear skin, thank God, a thin neck and a slight body. Intimidating, thy name wasn’t Trip.

I took the opportunity to look at him as well. He wasn’t just big and strong. He was maybe a half inch or so away from being handsome. He did attend to his jet-black hair. It was cut shorter than the current trend, just long enough to comb, and he did that. Just by doing that, he set himself apart from the crowd, and I realized while he couldn’t do much about the genetics that caused him to be bigger and stronger than anyone else, he could attend to his hair. That he did in a way that set him apart made him look a little more mature—something that would bear thinking about.

He had bright blue eyes. I couldn’t remember seeing anyone with black hair who’d had blue eyes before. Made me wonder if he dyed his hair! But I doubted it. He seemed a confident, solid person, not the type who worried about what color his hair was.

His voice was deeper than mine, but then everyone’s voice was deeper than mine. Surprisingly though, even being deeper-toned, there was a lightness to it and no aggression at all.

“I guess we’re working together in Montgomery’s class. Uh, are you okay with that?”

Wow! Why was he asking me that? I couldn’t figure out why off the top of my head. But then, why should I have to? There was an easier way to find out.

“Maybe,” I said. “But why are you asking me that?”

He nodded as if to say that was a fair question. “Because I’ve seen some guys giving you a hard time. I know some of them from sports, some on my teams. I could imagine you thinking they’re my friends. That I feel the same way they do about things. And I thought if we’re going to work together, we need to get that out on the table right away. There’s that and something else I need to know about you as well.”

Was he actually going to ask if I was gay? Probably. Again, one way to find out. “What?”

“I’ll tell you in a moment. First, I need to explain about those guys. I’m not like them at all. I guess they do what they do because they’ve decided that you’re gay and they need to prove to the world that they’re not. Or maybe they just like to mess with people if they can. I don’t know if you’re gay or not and don’t care. I judge people by how they behave, and I haven’t seen you do anything that makes me think I can’t work well with you, that we wouldn’t get along. I don’t see why we couldn’t be partners. So, there’s that. But that’s me. What about you. Are you okay with working with me, then?”

“I am gay.” He wanted it on the table, fine with me. I went ahead and put it there.

I was watching him closely, and he didn’t bat an eye. “No problem. So now I get to ask a question, the other thing I wanted to know. But I didn’t ask you whether you were gay; you volunteered it. Okay? Anyway, it’s my turn now.”

He looked very satisfied after saying that, as though he’d won an argument or something. I thought it only decent of me to grin back. That was a good decision, I thought, because I realized I was already grinning. My heart had sped up when he’d sat down. Intimidation, thy name definitely was Tanner. But the previously racing heart was back to normal now.

“So, what’s your question?” I asked.

“I don’t know you at all. Just like you don’t know me. The thing is, I’m planning to do well here in school. Academically, I mean. Get all A’s if I can. I want a partner who is after the same thing. I don’t want to work my ass off and have a partner who’s just along for the ride. What I want to know, going in, is if you’re smart and if you care what grade we get on the assignment?”

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