Raise Your Glass Read online

  Tales of Foster High

  by John Goode

  Maybe With a Chance of Certainty

  Kyle has worked hard at being the invisible student, toiling through high school in the middle of Nowhere, Texas. Brad is the baseball star at Foster High. Both boys are damaged in ways that the rest of the world can’t see. When they bond over a night of history tutoring, Kyle thinks that maybe his life has taken a turn for the not-so-lonely.

  He finds out quickly that the promise of fairy-tale love is a lie when you’re gay and falling for one of the most popular boys in school, and if being different is a sin in high school, then being gay is the biggest sin of all. Now Kyle and Brad need to come to an understanding amidst the scrutiny of their peers or their fledgling relationship will crash and burn before it ever gets off the ground.

  The End of the Beginning

  Sequel to Maybe With a Chance of Certainty

  Not too long ago, Brad Greymark outed himself to his high school and the rest of the town of Foster, Texas, with a fairly obvious public display of affection. Now what? Brad had thought being Foster’s favorite son wasn’t that important, but when it comes time to choose between high school fame and Kyle, the boy he might just be falling for? It’s not an easy decision, knowing his heart may break either way.

  Raise Your Glass

  Kyle

  YOU know what I hate?

  Okay, that’s a vague and open-ended question, so before you answer, let me clarify it some. You know what I hate about teenage movies? They never show the next day. I mean, sure, maybe the princess did indeed date the criminal, but how exactly did they make that work? Her friends would never talk to her again once they found out she was actually kissing some lowlife like him. His friends would disgust her with their rude and suggestive talk. Within a week they would be arguing about what to do with their weekend. She would want to go hang out at the mall and maybe see some chick flick, and he’d want to get burned with his friends and maybe play some Xbox. Fighting within two weeks, broken up in a month.

  The movie didn’t show that, did it?

  Or what about Sixteen Candles? So Jake gets her a birthday cake, and they blow the candles out on their rather flimsy-looking glass table. What’s next? Does he think his friends aren’t going to be very vocal in their confusion about who the hell this Samantha chick was in the first place? Even though they didn’t show many, you know she had to have friends too. Do you think any of them would constantly be asking her what he was like? What were they going to do for fun? She would go to two of his friends’ parties before she got fed up with the dirty looks that most of the girls shot her throughout the night. He would insist that she wasn’t giving them a fair chance, and she would argue that they were horrible people.

  They might even stay together until the topic of colleges came up. Obviously, Jake was headed for an Ivy League college, and Samantha wasn’t. They’d try a long-distance thing until the freshman mixer during orientation. Jake would be swamped by the first dozen girls who saw him and offered to help him with his homework and anything else he needed help with. When he came home for Christmas, he’d break it to her that they weren’t working out, and she’d spend the rest of her life wondering what she had done wrong.

  Kind of makes the idea of a sequel pretty dismal, doesn’t it?

  In the real world, Harry might have met Sally, but the movie doesn’t cover exactly how they made it work once the camera was off. Opposites may attract (which I do not believe, by the way), but they don’t make for an easy relationship, let me tell you. I may have had the hottest guy in school say he liked me, but I didn’t have any faith we were going to be a “we” for any amount of time. We sidestepped the whole going to school and facing the music problem that Friday by cutting school.

  The fact that we hadn’t even decided to date before we had our first actual fight only seemed to drive home the point that our being together was an incredibly bad idea.

  I walked out on him in the middle of a diner, for God’s sake. I mean, sure, he came back and apologized, and the whole thing with the ring and the 81 cents? Yeah, the boy has game, but now it’s Monday morning, and things are different. I don’t mean my gown turned back into a sack of flour and the carriage ended up as pumpkin soup, but things between us could not, obviously, be the same, because there were other things that remained the same.

  Foster High was still in the middle of nowhere, and the students and their teachers and administration were barely a step above the zombies in a Romero movie. I had images of being chased through the quad by a pack of villagers wielding pitchforks and torches while I stumbled forward in horrible lesbian boots with bolts in my neck.

  It has been said more than once that I have an overactive imagination.

  I paced my small room as I envisioned just about every blood-laden outcome if we were insane enough to show our faces at school again. I was used to being at the bottom of the social ladder. Actually, I was lower than the bottom; I usually hung out in the room next to the place they stored the ladder because people like me weren’t allowed to see it. Brad was a different story altogether. He was used to being so far up that I’m sure there were only clouds when he looked down. I had no idea how people were going to react to him coming out.

  If what he did counted as coming out.

  I mean, he could just say he had been defending me against Kelly, who is a raging asshole. There were ways for him to take back what had happened if he wanted, and that scared me. We had spent the weekend talking about him telling everyone he was gay, about how this wasn’t just a phase for him or a knee-jerk reaction to seeing someone get bullied. He had said he was falling for me. I wanted to believe that, but….

  But. It always comes down to buts, doesn’t it?

  I could be okay with being gay, but I lived in Foster, Texas, which meant me being gay constituted a mortal sin. I could be normal if my mom wasn’t clinically insane, so that was out of the question. And Brad might be falling in love with me, but I didn’t even like myself, so how could he think being in love with me was positive?

  I heard two horn blasts and knew I had run out of time to worry.

  I grabbed my backpack and ran out the front door, hoping the noise didn’t wake up my mother, the sleeping dragon. As I rushed outside, I saw him sitting behind the wheel of his brand-new yellow Mustang and felt my heart skip a beat in response to the sight. In my world there are precious few things that can be considered flawless. A weekend where my mother and I missed seeing each other because of our sleeping schedules was perfect. The Notebook is a perfect movie, in my opinion. Seasons two and three of One Tree Hill were perfect television. And Brad behind the wheel of his car was the perfect boy.

  He kept his hair slightly long. Though it was kept in place with product, it always seemed to be one step away from being disheveled. His eyes sparkled with what might be a dangerous energy; he looked like he was half a second from telling someone the punch line to a joke.

  And though he had several different smiles at his command, the one he flashed when I walked up to his car looked exactly like the others he’d used when we were together. So far those smiles had been the only actual signs of happiness I’d seen from him since we’d met.

  “Well, well, well,” he said as I got into the passenger seat. “If it isn’t Mr. Stilleno?”

  I fastened my seat belt and looked over at him. “Are you feeling okay? ’Cause you sound a little drunk.”

  His laughter filled the interior of the car and surrounded me like a blanket. “If I was drunk, I’d have hell to pay at practice this afternoon.” He leaned over toward me, and I felt his mouth touch mine, and the world stopped spinning for a second. All the air in my lungs escaped me as I leaned in and curled my hand aro
und his head. I ran my fingers through his hair and tried to experience as much happiness as I could in the moment. I was the brave little ant storing food away for the winter. I had no illusions that what came next wasn’t going to suck, but right now he was kissing me. And that was awesome.

  He leaned his forehead against mine as we sat there, with our eyes closed, which was the closest to prayer I got. “You ready?” he asked after a second.

  “I’m scared,” I said in a tiny voice that didn’t sound like me.

  “Me too,” he answered. I opened my eyes when I felt him move back. His eyes stared into mine. “But you know what?” I shook my head. “I know things are going to be okay.”

  I tried not to give him a look of complete shock. “Why do you think that?” He might as well have said that Deep Impact was better than Armageddon or that Lindsay Lohan was better than Hilary Duff. I mean, things were not going to be okay—he had to know that, right?

  Right?

  “Because I got you,” he said with grin number four, the one he used when he was trying to look all Ocean’s Eleven about a situation. It looked good on him, but what we were facing wasn’t something as simple as breaking into a casino vault. We were in high school in Foster freakin’ Texas, and we had just unmasked ourselves as alien invaders.

  “Okay” existed nowhere near where we were.

  But I knew Brad, and I knew what he was doing.

  This was where he tried to assure me that my concerns were valid while actually trying to calm himself down. The voices inside of my head screaming at me that this was a bad idea were echoed in his own. But I was afraid he might not be as adept at dealing with them as I had grown to be. My entire life was a horror movie where I was chased through my head by my doubts and insecurities while that annoying cha cha cha sound played in the background. I was willing to play the victim when I was the only one in danger of being made into kibbles and bits, but I could see the real fear behind that grin, and he wasn’t telling me it was going to be okay as much as he was asking me if it was going to be okay.

  Behind every strong man is a scared little boy wanting people to tell him it’s going to be okay. Remember that and men will no longer seem as stupid as you think they are.

  I gave him a wide grin and grabbed his hand. “Of course you have me. We do this together.” It seemed to assure him some. He took a deep breath and turned back toward the steering wheel. “You ready?”

  Not even close.

  “Always,” I lied, sounding completely sure.

  He pulled the gearshift, and we headed toward school and our future.

  Brad

  YOU know what I hate?

  Besides the designated hitter and AstroTurf, the thing that most pisses me off is waiting. The only thing worse than being whaled on by your drunken old man is waiting for your old man to beat you. Anticipation is one of the most destructive forces I know of in the universe, and that’s for good and bad things. It’s the feeling when you can’t wait to open your presents on Christmas morning—so bad that by the time everyone has woken up, you are so spazzed that you can’t help but bug the shit out of everyone. Then you realize how much you’re annoying people and you start to panic because you know it’s just a matter of time before you get smacked by your dad, which only makes the panic worse, so now you’re trying to overcompensate by being super helpful, which is just as, if not more, annoying than you were acting before, and you just end up freezing up with no idea what the right thing to do is.

  It’s like when you’re playing the outfield, thinking the game is mostly over. You’re out there counting the seconds before you can get your cup off and take a damn shower. You’re hot, tired, sweaty, and to be honest, ready to go home. Your uniform is too tight; it’s riding up in places that no guy wants to adjust in front of five hundred clapping fans (including your mom!) and you are just done with it. Sure, you’re ahead by one and there’s a guy on base, but all the pitcher needs to do is strike this jackass out and it’s over. What could possibly go wrong?

  By the way, if you don’t know the quickest way to fuck up your day, night, or whatever time it is, think to yourself, “What could possibly go wrong?” Fate is a total bitch and she loves to show off.

  And that’s when the batter actually gets behind the ball and pops one up into sky.

  Now, we’ve all seen this play. The ball sails up like it’s on fire and then starts to fall in a short arc. It’s called a rocket because it moves like a jet engine but really goes nowhere but up. So the ball hovers there, looking like it’s a mile above your head, defying gravity while it takes in the whole stadium in all its glory. All you can see is a speck of white way up there. Then it begins to grow larger.

  And here is where anticipation sucks balls.

  If you’re playing shortstop, and the guy smacks one between second and third, everything moves so fast that you have no time to think about it. You catch the crack of the bat against the ball and catch just the hint of something in your vision before your body begins to move. You scoop the ball up and are into your windup toward second before you even know what’s happening. More than once, I’ve been patted on the back for an awesome play before I even knew what I’d done. Whether you make the play or not, a line drive happens so fast you have no time to stress about it.

  The fly ball?

  All the time in the fucking world.

  You’ve waved the guy next to you off of it—because no one wants to be the asshole who slams into his own guy in the outfield—and claimed the play as your own. At that moment, time slows to a crawl as that dot becomes bigger and bigger. Now, some guys will tell you this is a routine play and that it there is nothing to it. Let me tell you, there is no such thing as a routine play. Balls like doing strange things when they make contact with a glove, doubly so if the ball senses fear from the catcher. They’re like animals waiting for that one chance to race past your legs and out into traffic. Every baseball wants to hit your glove and then jump out so you can be the fucktard who lost the game.

  You know your dad is watching you. Your mom. Your friends. Your girlfriend. The girl you wish was your girlfriend. Your buddies. Your buddies’ families. Everyone. If they’re on your side, they’re holding their breath, praying for you to catch it. If they’re for the other side, they’re cursing you with every bit of energy they have. The guy on first is halfway to second, watching to see if you’re going to lose your shit. The hitter has been on first since the late fifties, praying to every god he knows for you to flub. Suddenly your shoes are five sizes too large, and your cover fits you like you’re a four-year-old wearing your dad’s worn-out Rangers cap. You don’t want to glance at the runners, because that is admitting you are going to drop the ball and want to be ready to cut the guy off at third. Also, you never want to take your eyes off the ball, because you know from long experience that the second you do, it will spin violently in any other direction it can, just so when you and the fans look back, everyone wonders, “Why the hell was he so far away from the ball?”

  So, basically, this ball has been falling for like an hour and a half.

  You feel like you’ve been out there long enough to go grab a burger and get back before it falls. Yet it’s been seconds. You have imagined catching the ball and the team hoisting you on their shoulders in celebration, and you have seen the ball fall through your glove, and people in the stands are throwing food at you. All of this and more runs through your head as that ball swells larger and larger in the sky.

  As we drove to school, all I could see was that ball hurtling at me and I just knew I was going to drop it.

  Kyle had no idea how freaked out I was.

  At least I hope he didn’t. It’s hard to read Kyle sometimes. He’s smarter than any five guys I know, so knowing what was going on in that head of his is always a tricky proposition. He’s always thinking, and that might have been cool if he was a computer or something. For Kyle, thinking can just end up being destructive. It’s like he was always playi
ng chess in his mind against himself for stakes that were so high they were damned frightening.

  He clung to my hand as we drove, which, I had to admit, helped me relax more than a little. I had already bolted from doing this last Friday and I wanted to do the same all over again.

  Kyle was nervous; I mean, who wouldn’t be? But if he knew these people like I did, he’d be pissing himself. I’m sure that, to outsiders, the Popular People might seem like they have it made, but the reality is much different. And a lot darker.

  As I park the car, let me break it down for you so you can be prepared.

  Only so many people can be popular in a given place at any particular time. I figured out, by the way, that isn’t just for high school. The Rule of Popularity Limitation is pretty much universal. As far as I know, it applies all the way to Hollywood and the world in general. There is always a hot girl and then the ones around her. Doesn’t matter if you are talking about Marilyn Monroe or Megan Fox, there is always an It girl who captures the boys’ attention and the girls’ envy. There isn’t a rhyme or reason for why this happens, but there is just a something that people see and are attracted to. It isn’t about tits or ass or any of that. I mean, sure, the physical stuff helps, but in the end what grabs the attention is attitude more than actual physical looks. And there is only one spot that can be filled by one Girl—or Guy—of the Moment. One.

  Like Britney Spears: when she was hot, she was so hot. I mean, I remember being seven and thinking I was going to lose it when I saw her videos. She was It and everyone knew that. And then there were the girls around her. Christina Aguilera, Mandy Moore, Jessica Simpson—the list goes on and on. Now, there is nothing wrong with those girls. If you were to break it down attribute by attribute, there were better singers, better bodies, better dancing, better everything. Yet in the minds of everyone else, all those girls were just second to Britney. And they were girls. Britney was It.