Tanner Booth was sitting in my bedroom. Tanner Booth! My bedroom! If you’d told me yesterday that he’d be sitting on my bed the next day, I’d have written you off as a terminal head case.
Tanner wasn’t just a BMOC. The title ‘big man on campus’ seems to me to confer a status to someone that, on inspection, tends to make him a bit shallow, a bit undiversified, certainly one-dimensional. Most BMOCs I’ve ever encountered in literature were great ladies men or great sportsmen or big-time politicians. Great at something that overshadowed their shortcomings in other areas.
Which were usually critical to the story.
Maybe Tanner had those shortcomings, but at our school he was at the top of everything that a kid in the first year of middle school can be. I hadn’t known that. I’d lumped him in with the guys who hung with him. He’d made that clear to me right from the outset. He hadn’t said he hung with them but that they hung with him.
After our talk at lunch, I’d done some research on him. How? By speaking to teachers and the librarian. I knew her well because I spent a lot of time in the library. She knew him, too, and spoke very highly of him. So did the teachers I asked, but none of them knew him well. We’d only been in this new school for a couple of weeks now. I didn’t bother asking the gym teacher. I knew what he’d say about him: give me twenty more just like him! That was all the gym teacher would have been interested in; he probably knew whether he was good in learning plays and tackling people. I didn’t need to know about that. The librarian had had more contact with him than his teachers, and she was a good source.
I learned that Tanner was a whole lot more than an athlete. When reading the school newspaper, I saw that he had written a column which had been included, and it was all about his observations about the school from the viewpoint of a new kid just starting there. So far—meaning in the one issue that had come out so far this year—he hadn’t mentioned sports at all.
He was helping out re-shelving books in the library, played drums in the band, and every teacher I spoke with said, without getting specific, that they were pleased to have him in their class.
I took that to mean he was a decent student, not one to sit in the back and make snide comments about the teacher under his breath. I thought it possible that getting all A’s wouldn’t be a pie-in-the-sky aim for him. All A’s. Just the same goal I had. All along, since my abuse had begun, my secret plan had been to be valedictorian and to be able to give a graduation speech, probably standing on a stool to be seen. I hadn’t planned what I would say. It would depend on how I was treated in my third year. Here, middle school was grades seven through nine, and high school was ten through twelve. Most school districts that I knew of had four-year high schools, but our high-school building was old and small, so there was room for only three grades.
I was a newly-fledged seventh grader and twelve years old, soon to reach thirteen, which age I’d be by the time I’d be entering eighth grade. I would graduate after grade nine and leave middle school behind at the age of fifteen.
So, knowing he’d show up, I’d waited for him in the library after school. The librarian said this was one of the days he came in; no training activities that day, I guessed. He had a soccer match the next day, and the coach liked them to rest the day before, so he didn’t have a practice to attend. I spoke to him in the library, and the very next day, here he was, in my bedroom.
Okay, I can imagine some confusion here: specifically, if he had a soccer game, what was he doing in my bedroom?
Sitting on my bed, that’s what. Okay, okay, I’ll stop being snarky.
See, in middle school, interschool matches happen in the afternoons after classes, not at night. And in the library the day before, I’d asked if he’d like to get started on the World History assignment at my house after dinner the next day. Which would be after the soccer match. He’d said yes, I’d given him directions, and here he was.
I was a little nervous but only because I’d never had anyone over for a study session before. Actually, I’d never had anyone over since my elementary-school friends had ditched me, deciding I was persona non grata. That had started in the second semester of sixth grade. That was long enough ago that now I wasn’t sure exactly how to act or feel about having someone I didn’t know alone with me in my bedroom.
Tanner didn’t seem nervous at all, but he never had and probably never would, it appeared to me. I, on the other hand, was feeling something. It felt like excited anticipation, which I’d always felt before when anything I was doing or thinking involved sex. Not that I knew much about sex, just what boys my age learned to do by themselves, but the feeling I had was something like the feeling that led up to doing that thing or even just made me think about that. Here, now, I was alone in my room with another boy, and that excited feeling was there.
I knew nothing of that sort would happen. I was certain of that and didn’t even know if I wanted it to. But my imagination was running wild with possibilities. What if he reached out and touched me? What if he reached down and adjusted himself while looking at me? What if he did something, anything, that suggested he was interested in doing stuff with me? It was that kind of a tingling feeling, and knowing how improbable it was that anything would actually happen made no difference. The feeling was there, and I was dealing with it.
He looked around my room. I’d picked up all the clutter before he’d come. I’d even made the bed and cleared off my computer desk. I watched him spend most of his time after coming in looking at my two bookcases and nodding. Then he came over and sat on my bed. I was already there and had to slide over a bit so we wouldn’t be too close. Made me wonder: was he showing he didn’t mind sitting next to me, wasn’t afraid any gay cooties would contaminate him? I mean, he could have taken my computer chair. Did he want to sit close to me?
The jittery feelings intensified.
I waited for him to speak. He did but not the way I thought he would. I’d expected him to talk about how we should go about working together.
“So… I’ve never known or even heard of anyone named Trip. Is this a family thing?”
I guessed he wanted to be friendly, get to know me, not just dig into the work. Maybe have us get to know each other a bit. I had no problem with that. Maybe it would calm me down.
“Sort of a family name, in a way, although no one else in the family shares that name.”
He looked at me funny, so I laughed and explained. “My granddad, my father and I all have the same first name, so my dad is a second and I’m a third, or a triple. That’s where the Trip comes from.”
“Ah, I get it. So, that’s not your given name. Yet Mr. Montgomery calls you Trip. Teachers usually don’t go with nicknames.”
“That’s because my dad registered me as Trip Schroder. He knew I’d be teased enough because of how I carry myself and act. So, he wanted to take away at least one thing for me to be embarrassed about. There’s nothing wrong with my real name, except it’s a little old-fashioned. Well, maybe a lot old-fashioned.”
He looked at me, and I could see the question forming on his lips, and then, surprisingly, he didn’t ask it. Instead, he said, “I don’t much like Tanner. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because it’s unusual enough to stand out. I’d rather be Bob or Tom or like that.”
“You don’t want to stand out? You?” That sounded so silly to me. He stood out in everything he did.
“No, I don’t. I want to fit in. Just be normal. Don’t you?”
“Well, there’s no hope of that for me. At least until college. I’ve heard that in college, gay kids don’t really stand out, that no one else cares about anyone else’s sexuality . I won’t fit in here, however, so I don’t bother thinking about it or regretting it. Waste of time and won’t change anything.”
I could see him chewing that over. Then he said, “You’re stronger than you look. Well, okay, that’s good. Now, any ideas about this assignment? How we should go about it?”
So we got busy. We had a lot to look up. I could see right away that the map we’d been given showing all the outlines of European countries with no names filled in was way too small to work with. We’d need reading glasses before we’d finished the assignment. Luckily, I knew how to fix that. And, how in the world were we supposed to write Luxembourg in a space that tiny?
“Why don’t you start matching country names with capital cities. You can use my computer to look that up. Do you know Excel? That’ll be much better for doing what we need to do than Word. While you’re doing that, I’ll enlarge the map.”
He frowned. “How will you do that?”
I grinned. “Magic,” I said, then took the map and left the room.
Here’s where I need to fill in a little more about myself and my family. I don’t like talking about it because, well, we’re pretty well off. My dad is a city councilman, and my mom has her Realtor license and is a partner in a real-estate firm in the city. Both bring in the bucks. So, we live in a great house in a fine neighborhood and have things a lot of people don’t. Mom works at an office downtown, but she has an office in our house, too, and being a partner, can dictate her own hours. That’s what makes it easy for her to pick me up from school. She comes home and often goes back to work, but in her home office.
She has a fancy-schmancy Xerox machine, and it can blow up or reduce originals. The map original I had was on an eight-by-eleven inch piece of paper and had margins that made the map even smaller. Mom had three sizes of paper, and I used the largest, eleven-by-seventeen inch, what she called tabloid size and used for her maps to show the areas around prospective for-sale homes. It made a very usable map for us to work with. I thought about it and made four maps on paper that size—one for each of us to work with on our own, one for our final submission, and one extra in case we needed it. Boys our age are prone to screwing up paperwork. Not just paperwork, either, come to think about it.
I guess I should mention more about our house and neighborhood just to get it over with. We have a three-quarter-acre lot with a four-thousand-plus square foot house. It’s large for the three of us but dad says when they get around to selling it, it’ll probably go for twice what he paid for it, or more! We have a swimming pool. Dad and Mom don’t swim much, but Dad had said, back when I was younger, I should join an athletic team to fit in the school better, and the swim team would be perfect for me because size didn’t matter as much as form there. He said I’d need to spend a lot of time swimming to learn the correct form to be ready when I was old enough to make the team. To do that, I needed to have to have a place to train. So he had the pool put in. He was expecting more of me than I was!
Of course, my dad being who he was, a lawyer but a politician at heart with a lawyer’s head on his shoulder, didn’t just put in the pool. He figured pool parties would be a schmoozing activity if he was running for some office, say mayor, so he put in a pool house with showers, changing rooms, and a communal area with a wet bar, too. Seeing that, I realized my having a training place wasn’t the only reason for the pool! He was a politician, and those guys get good at blowing smoke. His explanation for installing the pool just for me was partially smoke. He wanted a place to entertain potential future supporters, too.
I didn’t bother using the pool house. I just changed into my bathing suit in my bedroom whenever I wanted to swim. Which was pretty much every day. Our middle school did have a swim team; tryouts were at the beginning of second semester, and I wanted to be ready. But I loved swimming and did it just for the fun of it. I didn’t expect to make the team, expecting bigger, stronger boys would be better swimmers, but I didn’t want to embarrass myself, either.
I took the large blank maps back up to my bedroom. Tanner looked at them and grew a wide smile.
“Hey, these are great! You know, teachers like us to go beyond the assignment; that’s part of my plan to get all A’s. With these, we not only can show each country’s name and its capital, but add major rivers, too, and we’ll have room to include the population. Sure, that’s more work, but we have lots of time. Whadda you think?”
I thought I liked his smile. I grinned back. “Sure thing. But I’m wondering, with these things so big, if it might be better for us to work at the dining room table?”
Tanner glanced around. I had a large bedroom. All the bedrooms in the house were large, with their own private bathrooms. “I like your room,” he said. “And your desk is large enough for a map. Besides, your computer is here. This is nice and cozy!”
He gave me a look I couldn’t interpret. But I realized that I liked working close to him. Alone with him. I wondered if he was thinking that same thing. And I liked that anticipatory feeling that was still lurking in the background.