End of the Innocence Page 9

  I sat there stunned, staring stupidly at him rubbing the butt of his smoke out in the ashtray. I had never heard anyone just admit they thought about killing themselves before. I mean, you heard people say stuff like that, but they were either making a bad joke or desperately crying out for help. I think it was the matter-of-fact way Robbie spoke that eliminated any thoughts I might have had that he was being cynical. No one I had ever known would have just said, “Oh yes, I had some breakfast, cleaned my room, and then thought about killing myself.” My mind recoiled from his words.

  “Oh, don’t look at me that way. Trust me, every gay kid thinks about it at least once. Tell me you haven’t.” I looked away, and he let out a small, spiteful laugh. “Trust me, you don’t even want to know what the suicide rate is for gay teens. So anyway, yeah, my Brad wasn’t as nice as yours, so be thankful for what you got.”

  “I am,” I said softly.

  “Good.”

  We had come to an impasse again, and the silence stuck its ugly head between us once more. Robbie turned on the music. I watched the nothing that surrounded Foster and was visible all the way to the distant horizon rush past my window. It seemed impossible that I’d ever escape this place. It was just too big, and at this very moment… seemed like it was my everything.

  “Where am I dropping you off?” he asked when we got into town.

  I checked the time and saw school was almost getting out. “School. I need to talk with Brad before practice.” He nodded and turned toward Foster High.

  “So when do you want to start?” he asked as we pulled into the school parking lot. Startled out of my thoughts, confused, I looked over at him. “You still owe me for the clothes, and you’re going to need another set of clothes if you are going to the party.”

  “Um, Monday, right?” I offered, since there was no way in hell I could pay for the clothes I’d already ruined. The business about needing more to go to the party I just let slide away.

  “Sounds good. I don’t do mornings all that well, so any time after ten is good.” He didn’t sound upset now, but there was a difference in his demeanor from when he picked me up that morning.

  “I’m sorry I’m not the person you thought I was,” I said before getting out of the car. “I wish I was.”

  He stared straight ahead, both hands twisting around the steering wheel “The thing is,” he said finally, staring over at me, “you are. You just don’t know it yet.” I opened my mouth to argue, but he held his hand up, stopping me. “I’m not in the mood for a debate. Just remember what I said.” The dismissal bell rang, and he smiled. “You better grab Brad before practice.”

  As much as I wanted that debate, Robbie had also made a good point; if I didn’t catch Brad before he got to the gym, I would have to wait until practice was over. “Thanks for lunch,” I said, getting out of the car.

  “See you Monday,” he called back.

  I watched him drive away, wondering why he thought I was someone I knew I wasn’t and didn’t want to be. I ignored the thought and jogged toward the gym. I caught up to Brad just as he pulled his gym bag out of his car.

  When he saw me, he dropped his bag and scooped me up into a hug. You’d swear we hadn’t seen each other for years instead of hours. I wrapped my arms around him and buried my face in his shoulder. The smell of his hair gel, cologne, and his letterman jacket just made the stress of the day fade away as he whispered “I missed you” in my ear.

  “Not as much as I missed you,” I whispered back. “I should have gone to school with you.”

  He pulled back and looked into my eyes. “Are you okay?” I nodded. “I should have known that the clothes were—”

  “Shut up,” I said before kissing him.

  My day got a thousand times better right then and there.

  “We have to talk,” he said after a few incredibly satisfying seconds of kissing.

  And my day got a million times worse.

  If I am ever made Overlord of the World, I’m going to make a few changes. After the whole world peace and wiping out bigotry things, I am going to make specific alterations to the way the world works. First on that list, after, you know, I make Taylor Lautner and Zac Efron my servants, I am going to ban people from using the phrase “We have to talk” unless the end of the world truly comes. There is nothing more frightening than someone looking at you and, in a serious voice, announcing “We need to talk.” I mean, I would rather have someone say “You are on fire” than “We have to talk.”

  “We have to talk” was my mom’s way of telling me that something bad—or worse—had happened. When I was nine, we had to pack our stuff and move out of the apartment we were currently living in. One of the guys she had been dating got out of jail and was coming back to town completely pissed. Mom started her explanation by saying, “We have to talk.” When she told me she had taken my computer to a pawn shop so we could make rent, she started by saying, “We have to talk.” And when I asked who my dad was, she just got quiet, told me to sit down, and sighed, “We have to talk.”

  I hated those words. Well, not those specific words, because they have other uses. But those four words in that order just caused every nerve ending I had to pulse with fear.

  So hearing those words coming out of Brad’s mouth? I almost wet myself as I imagined the worst.

  “What?” I asked as my mouth went dry.

  “I just….” he began to say as he looked over at the locker room. “It’s going to take more time than I got right now. You going home?”

  I shrugged.

  He tossed me his keys. “If you want to hang out, listen to music in the car or go sit in the stands and watch us practice.” He leaned in and kissed me. “I promise to be fast.”

  He turned and ran into the locker room.

  I just knew he was going to break up with me.

  Lunch threatened to come back up in the most violent manner possible as I berated myself for screwing things up. I shouldn’t have told him I wasn’t going to school. I shouldn’t have been so wrapped up in my own shit. And then it hit me.

  I should have had sex with him.

  Dammit! He had hinted he wanted to take the physical stuff further, but I had been so fucking afraid I put it off, and now he was breaking up with me because I was a coward. I thought about how crappy the last few months of school would be without having Brad by my side, and I honestly felt my stomach convulse in response. He was the only thing that made any of this bearable, and if I lost him….

  I needed to have sex with him. I needed to get him to understand I was willing to do anything to keep him, no matter how unready I felt I was. It wasn’t like I didn’t want to have sex with him. I mean, look at him! Who wouldn’t want to have sex with him? I was just too freaked out about the whole mechanics of it to commit. I mean, it wasn’t like a guy and a girl. When they decided to have sex, they both knew what was going where and who supplied the necessary parts. With Brad and me, it wasn’t that easy. We both had the same parts and neither one of us seemed all that willing to have that part shoved into new places.

  I was desperate.

  I got into his car and turned the air conditioner and radio on full blast. “Somebody I Used to Know” came roaring out of the speakers, and I slammed my hand against the radio to stop it. My life had begun to sound way too much like that song for me to hear it right now. I took a look at myself in the rearview mirror and felt the normal wave of revulsion I felt when I looked at myself. Everything about my face was wrong to me. My eyes were too big, my nose pointy, and I didn’t even want to go into the catastrophe that was my mouth. It felt like I had been constructed by a lot of leftover parts from the Handsome People Assembly Line. I’d been given the castoffs since I had to have some kind of face.

  I had been stupid to think he would want to be with me this long.

  The cold air felt good, and I leaned back in the seat and tried to calm my pounding heart. I had started down in a steeply angled spiral of negative thoughts. If I did
n’t try to level out now, I would just end up running home and locking my door for a year or so.

  I fell asleep eventually. Images of Brad with his arm around Jennifer, laughing at me as they walked away, terrified me. I kept trying to run after him, but every time I did, I would trip and fall down. The third time I looked to see what was tripping me, and I saw I was wearing high heels and a dress. I heard laughing and realized all of Foster High’s students stood in a circle surrounding me, all of them pointing as they roared at me. I tried to pull the shoes off but they wouldn’t budge. Then I saw Brad standing in the crowd. “What do you expect? You’re a fag. You should dress like one.”

  I woke up screaming. No laughing students, no dress, no shoes, and no Brad mocking me. No Brad— Dazed, I looked around and saw Brad frozen in midmotion next to the half-open driver’s side door, gaping at me in shock. “Whoa!” he said carefully. “You just scared the living shit out of me.”

  I rubbed my face to banish the images of the nightmare from my mind. “I fell asleep…,” I mumbled.

  He tossed his bag into the backseat. “Jeez, you’re lucky you didn’t die of hypothermia,” he exclaimed, turning the air conditioning down. “Bad dream?”

  I nodded and shakily pushed myself upright in the seat.

  “So—” he began to say.

  “I love you and want to have sex,” I blurted so fast I somehow made it all one syllable.

  He froze again, mouth hanging open. Eyes blinking slowly and brow furrowed, he stared at me.

  “I mean it. I’m sorry I was an asshole this morning, and I shouldn’t have done it, and I want to have sex with you badly, and please don’t break up with me.”

  His mouth snapped shut, almost as if it was spring driven.

  “I know I’m moody, and I know you can get someone better-looking, but please, you’re all I have right now, and if I have to face people and have them ask me why we broke up, I think I’ll die, and I love you, and I don’t know why I kept putting off sex and… please?”

  His eyes narrowed in anger, and he looked away as he started the car. “Buckle up” was all he said. I barely got the seat belt on before he threw the car into reverse. I heard the tires squeal as he turned the car with one hand and slammed it into drive with the other. Smoke from the burned rubber trailed behind us as the Mustang peeled out of the parking lot.

  “Um, where are we going?” I asked, trying not to grab the door handle and jump from a car rolling along at God knows what speed.

  He said nothing.

  “Brad?” I asked, not liking the look on his face.

  “Please. Stop. Talking,” he asked in a voice that sounded to me like pure serial killer.

  This was the second time today I was stuck in a car feeling I was going to have internal organs harvested in some out-of-the-way place.

  We headed out past First Street toward the lake. The sun was almost down, which meant there wasn’t much traffic at all. And it was deserted, a perfect place to bury a body. I tried to banish that thought as Brad pulled off into a small dirt road that would have been impossible to see unless a driver knew where to look. A tiny grove of cottonwood trees grew around the perimeter of a clearing that contained a fire pit for grilling. The place looked like an old, discarded camping spot that hadn’t been used in a long time.

  We parked, and Brad got out of the car. I huddled there for a few seconds, not sure if I was supposed to follow. He looked at me through the front window and pointed for me to join him. I got out slowly, wondering if I could just go back to him breaking up with me instead of him kicking my ass before he dumped me.

  I walked around the front of the car but kept out of arm’s reach of him.

  “Okay, look,” he snarled. “I don’t know what your fucking mom has done to you, and, to be honest, I don’t want to know, because if I did, then it would be impossible for me to resist the urge to punch her in the face. We need to get a few things straight if this is going to continue.” He stopped, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to answer since there wasn’t a question. Instead I just nodded.

  “I don’t know how she convinced you that you were worthless, but it’s bullshit. Plain bullshit. You are the most… just… you are the best person I have ever met, and I have shaken Nolan Ryan’s hand. There is nothing about you that doesn’t blow me away on every single level there is. You are smart, cute, brave, humble, and just….” He swallowed as he tried to contain the emotion in his voice. “You are the only good thing that has ever happened to me. Ever. And if you can’t get it through your skull how crazy I am about you—then we are going to have problems.”

  This didn’t sound like anything I had imagined.

  “I love you. That isn’t a like, isn’t a puppy love, and it isn’t a crush. The moment we kissed in my room, I was yours; it just took my stupid brain time to figure it out. You are everything I need in my life, but more importantly, you are everything I will ever need. I am never going to break up with you. Never. If we break up, and, God, I hope that’s a gigantic ‘if’, it will be because you realized I was not the guy you thought I was and that you can do better. So no matter what happens between us, I will never break up with you. Got it?”

  I knew what he was saying was supposed to be romantic, but he sounded so angry. I just nodded.

  “You are going to outgrow me, Kyle. I know that in my heart, and it terrifies me. But you should never, ever worry that I am going to break up with you. Because it will never happen.” He was close to crying, and it was killing me.

  I cleared the distance between us in two strides and wrapped my arms around him so tight my shoulders hurt. He clasped me back, and we stood there in front of his car holding each other for dear life. “I am never not going to love you,” I said to him when I could talk.

  He swallowed and looked me straight in the eyes.

  “I used to fool around with Kelly.”

  I felt a chill run up my spine and took a half step away from him.

  Maybe I was hasty in saying never.

  BRAD

  THERE are times I wished I was a douchebag.

  I know that sounds like something no one would want to be, but there are times I wish I was missing a conscience or whatever those guys didn’t have. Not having a conscience or whatever allowed them to be complete assholes to other people and never feel a thing afterward. I have seen Josh Walker be a complete shit to a girl. Then, within ten minutes of her confronting him with his fuckery, he could turn what he did around so completely that she was grateful to still be going out with him.

  If I was a douche, I could have done that to Kyle and not been in trouble.

  But I wasn’t and I couldn’t.

  I could never have looked into his eyes and treated him like shit. I had a feeling even if I was one of those guys, I still couldn’t hurt him. I could have just assured him that I had no intention of breaking up with him and let it be, but I just couldn’t keep what Kelly and I had done away from him anymore.

  “What did you say?” he asked me, taking a half step away from me.

  “A long time ago, before you and I ever met, I fooled around with Kelly,” I said, resisting the urge to move toward him. The worst thing I could do was crowd him. If I had learned anything from dating Kyle, it was when he needed his space, he needed it.

  His face just turned white, and he had a hand over his mouth like he was on the verge of throwing up. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked after gaining some composure.

  He’d asked a good question. Why hadn’t I?

  Well, I was embarrassed about it. That was at the top of the list. Followed closely by “I was afraid Kyle would one day realize I wasn’t the guy he thought I was and leave.” Good reasons, both.

  In the end, though? In the end, the real answer was because, as I had since I was ten, I was deflecting attention away from my mistakes. Standing there looking at Kyle and realizing how truthful he had been to me since day one, I knew I needed to stop. I needed to man up.

&n
bsp; In hesitating words, I began to explain how we started fooling around during football camp and how it was always Kelly doing the touching while I just lay there. Then I described how when people started becoming suspicious of the way Kelly acted toward me, I just dropped him as a friend. And then I added that I thought Kelly might harbor some feelings toward me after all this time.

  And then I waited for Kyle to hate me.

  “Was that why he went apeshit on me in the quad?” he asked.

  It was a good question, one I had asked myself more than once over the past few months. I shrugged because I didn’t have any more of an answer than I did the day it happened.

  “So wait, when you came out in front of everyone, you were telling the truth that Kelly used to….” He seemed to choke on his own words before he tried again. “Are you telling me that Kelly is not just a homophobic asshole but might be a jealous ex-boyfriend?” He really sounded mad now.

  “He was never my boyfriend,” I said bluntly.

  “Did he know that?” he raged back at me. “Or did you just smile at him and imply the whole thing?”

  Now I was getting mad. “Are we still talking about Kelly?”

  “I don’t know.” He was on the verge of yelling now. “How do I know you didn’t say the same things to him that you’ve told me? How do I know you won’t do the same thing to me you did to him?”

  Something in my head snapped.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I screamed. “How many different ways can I say I love you? Seriously Kyle, is there a number somewhere that will quiet the voices in your head? Is it ten? Twenty? A hundred? Pick a number, and I will do it. Just let me know what it will take, and I swear to you I will not stop trying until you believe me, but this is getting old. I did not go out with Kelly; he sucked my dick for a week. I did not tell him anything I have told you. In fact, I didn’t tell him a thing, which just makes me a bigger asshole than the one you’re imagining. Whatever! I’m tired of hiding it. I was scared and horny and I used him for sex and then ignored him. If you think that is what I am doing to you, then obviously we have different ideas about what is going on here.”