Chapter 2
Grounded
Josha
“Hey! You got a hex wrench in that toolbox? I could use a little help.”
The boy materializes out of the manzanitas at the border of our backyard, pushing a green bicycle by its slightly mangled handlebars.
He looks close to my age—lanky, with the hint of new muscle and the sharpening jaw I’ve started to notice on my classmates.
His gray T-shirt hugs his shoulders, and his eyes are an aquamarine blue beneath thick lashes, prettier than any girl’s.
He shoves a hand through his dark brown curls as I stare, and the bright streak of blood on his forearm yanks my gaze from his face.
“You’re hurt.” I set the DeWalt on the roof of the chicken coop, wedging it carefully into the corrugated metal so it doesn’t slide off. “I can get some Band-Aids and Neosporin.”
“Nah.” He shrugs, letting the bike slump against a cocked hip while he squints at the scrape on his elbow. “It doesn’t hurt. But I can’t ride home unless I fix my handlebars, and I hate pushing it through the woods.”
“Oh.” I turn to rummage through the toolbox, conscious of his gaze on my back and wishing I was wearing a shirt. Or that I had muscles of my own instead of freckled shoulders and worn jeans that dig into my hips. “What size hex do you need?”
“Um, the medium-sized one?”
When I glance over my shoulder, he’s sucking on his lower lip and eyeing the coop. “Did you build this whole thing all by yourself?”
“No. My dad did most of it. But he messed up the roof, so I’m fixing it. See how the corrugation runs sideways instead of vertical? I gotta flip it, but it’s taking forever because he’ll never buy me more screws. So I have to be extra careful not to fuck up the gaskets or the threads.”
“And he lets you use his power tools?” The boy juts his chin at the cordless drill. “That’s so cool.” His obvious admiration strums at my chest, making my heart flutter strangely, and I uncurl from my crouch with the small case of hex wrenches heavy in my tingling fingertips.
I have no idea how this boy ended up in my yard, but he feels like the answer to a question I didn’t even know I was asking.
“Do you want to help?”
His smile is staggering, and it hits me like the streak of light across the ocean when the sun dips below the fog.
“Can I use the power drill?” he asks.
I hesitate, my mind flashing to my dad passed out on the couch in the double-wide behind us.
I’m not supposed to use the tools with my friends.
Which is a stupid rule because the only one who comes over is Penny, and all she wants to do is watch Marvel movies and play vintage Mario Kart on the Switch.
Reading my uncertainty, the boy’s shoulders sag.
“It’s okay,” he says, tossing his head with a nonchalance I don’t believe. “I’m not allowed to use the one at home either.”
“Why not?”
“I keep leaving them out to get rained on.” He takes in my horrified expression with a shrug.
“Yeah, that’s pretty much how my mom looked the last time she found one.
Only with a lot more yelling.” He glances down at his tilted handlebars.
“But I can maybe be trusted with a socket wrench. If you show me which one to use.”
“What if I fix your bike, and you finish pulling the screws out of the roof. With the driver.” I snatch it up and hold it out, revving the motor briefly in a frantic attempt to see him smile again.
“Really? I’ll probably fuck it up. Strip the gaskets or whatever.” But a grin tugs at the corners of his wide mouth, and I decide I’ll buy the replacement screws myself if I need to.
“Nah. It’s not that hard.”
“I’m Gem,” he says, offering his hand. The tips of my ears burn when I clasp it. His fingers are strong and a little rough, and a shock runs up my arm at the contact.
“I’m Josha.”
“So how’d you wreck your bike, anyway?” I ask, trying to clean one of the bolts enough to fit the hex wrench into the head. Luckily, the handlebars aren’t bent, only jammed out of position, but the bolts are all gunked up with the sandy pygmy soil, so it’s taking me forever to loosen them.
“I’m grounded.”
I blink at him, confused.
“You ran away?”
“Nah. I’m allowed to ride my bike around. Grounded means something different in my family.” His dark eyes sparkle with conspiracy, begging me to ask.
“What does it mean, then?”
“No aerials. I’m in the circus.” He waits for me to be suitably impressed.
I have no idea what “aerials” are, but I don’t disappoint him. “The circus? Like, with elephants and clowns and stuff?”
“No elephants. My parents don’t believe in them. Only people. Acrobats and jugglers and contortionists,” he adds with obvious pride.
“Your parents don’t believe in elephants?” I’ve only seen them in YouTube videos, but I know they’re real. Not like unicorns or dragons. He laughs, and I blush, but only partly from embarrassment.
“They don’t believe in abusing animals for human entertainment,” he clarifies. It has the feel of a practiced statement, something he’s heard and explained a hundred times, and my cheeks heat further.
“We only keep chickens for the eggs,” I hasten to explain. “They’re not…abused, or anything.”
“I heard chickens are really stupid, anyway,” he says, watching Rosie the Rhode Island Red peck through the sawdust at my feet. “And we eat them, so…that’s kind of abusive.” He laughs again at my horror, the sound bright and a little scratchy in a way that makes me curl my toes in my sneakers.
“That was the last screw.” He bangs his fist on the loose metal and yelps when the whole thing slides off with a loud rattle. Before it can crush his toes, he leaps back with feline grace and shoots me a shocked grin. “Whoops. What next?”
“Next, we flip it and screw it back on. That’s the fun part.” I show him the sharp grooves along the length of the screws and the little black gaskets that make the watertight seal, and we spend the next hour kneeling together on the roof, passing the screw gun back and forth.
He talks a lot. Which is nice because it means I don’t have to. And because his voice is low and scratchy and warmer than the tentative May sunshine.
He tells me his family finally bought their own circus tent and moved onto the undeveloped property behind ours.
That he grew up in Europe, traveling around to countries I’ve only imagined and some, like Croatia, I’ve never even heard of.
Apparently, he’s started training on something called a Chinese pole.
He swears it’s not a stripper pole, even though it sounds similar, and I have to pretend to be concentrating really hard on the sheet metal screws to keep from thinking about the YouTube videos I’ve seen on my friends’ phones.
The girls in those videos never really interested me, but imagining Gem in one of those strappy underwear things, dancing around with a sultry smile, is enough to make my brain explode.
To change the subject before I pop a boner, I tell him the next thing I want to do is wire a light-sensitive switch that will close the coop automatically when it gets dark. Mainly so my dad will stop yelling at Jeremy for leaving it open every time a skunk or a bobcat steals one of the chickens.
“You know how to do electrical work?”
“A little bit. There’s an after-school club I did in sixth grade before…before my dad got bad again and I had to start coming home to watch Jeremy until my mom gets home from the clinic.”
“Is he sick or something? Your dad?”
“He’s an alcoholic.”
Gem sits back on his heels and glances at me, the screw gun limp in his hand. “That sucks.”
“I’m used to it.” My shoulders shift uncomfortably, and I take the tool, focusing on the next screw along my edge. “He doesn’t beat us or anything. He just yells and sleeps a lot.”
“You should come over and meet my dad. He does all the electrical for the tent, and I bet he’d teach you some stuff, if you wanted.”
The awkward tension melts from my body as I peek at his face.
“That’d be awesome. I bet there’s all kinds of cool stuff to build for a circus show.”
When all the screws are tightened, we lie side by side on the sun-warmed metal, and his elbow presses casually against mine.
He tells me about his parents’ plan for their new traveling show, which they’re gonna call Big River Big Top, and I tell him about the best places to swim in the summer and how there’s a bike trail to the logging road across the street that runs all the way down to the beach.
I don’t tell him I think he’s beautiful.
Or that the way his blue eyes crinkle at the corners as he squints up at the afternoon clouds makes me want to press my fingers into the hollow of his throat.
Boys don’t tell each other those kinds of things when they’re thirteen, even here in Northern California.
Maybe when we get to high school.
The slamming of the screen door jolts me out of my vague daydreams, and I lurch upright, but it’s only Jeremy, standing on the steps in a pair of loose dinosaur pajamas. Beside me, Gem props himself up on his elbows.
“Dad’s awake,” my brother says, eyeing the two of us. “Who’s that?”
“This is Gem.” I slide to the ground and start packing the drill back in its hard case with the charger and the extra battery. “His family moved in next door.”
“Do you live in a trailer too?”
“Yeah, but it’s a lot smaller than yours,” Gem says, scanning the roof for loose screws and scooping any he finds into the box. “We do have a big-ass circus tent, though. You ever been to a circus?”
Jeremy shakes his head, eyes wide.
“It’s pretty cool. We’re gonna do a camp for little kids this summer, if you wanna check it out.”
“I’m not a little kid,” Jeremy protests. “I’m seven and a half.”
“My sister turns seven next month. Maybe you can be friends like me and Josha.” He gifts me another luminescent smile that turns conspiratorial as he hands me the box with the remaining screws.
“Fair warning—she’s not smart enough to fix your bike if you wreck it, though.
I bet she wouldn’t even know what size wrench to use. ”
An unfamiliar sense of pride fills my chest, adding to the glow of the whole afternoon.
I get okay grades, and my big sister Hannah sometimes tells me I’m the smartest one in the family, but mostly after my dad chews me out for doing something he thinks is stupid, so I’m not sure it counts when she says it.
Gem is looking at me with actual admiration, and I might stop breathing from the impact.
“I don’t have a bike. Will you make me a tuna sandwich, Josha?”
“Sure, bud. Go get the celery and the mayo out of the fridge, and I’ll be right there. Don’t touch the knife, though. And see if Dad wants one too.”
“I guess I should get going,” Gem says after Jeremy shuts the door behind him. He’s still sitting on the chicken coop, arms wrapped around his knees, studying me with a curiosity that has me scrubbing a hand through my hair and blushing again. “Can I come back tomorrow and help you wire that door?”
“Do you want to go see a movie tonight?” I blurt, the weight of his attention making me brave. “Guardians of the Galaxy 2 is at the Fort Bragg theater, and my sister’s boyfriend said he’d take us in his car.”
“Is that the one with the talking raccoon and the green chick?”
“Rocket and Gamora. Yeah.”
“I never saw the first one. Is it good?”
“Only the best Marvel movie ever made.”
“Oh yeah?” His grin is a challenge, and something inside me unfurls in delight.
“Yeah.”
“Let me text my mom.” He digs an iPhone out of his pocket and starts typing while I pack up the last of the tools.
“If I get Jeremy fed and my dad’s in an okay mood, we have time to watch the first one in my room.” On my bed.
“Sure. Can I get one of those tuna sandwiches too?”
“Your mom said it’s okay? She doesn’t care that it’s a school night?”
“Nope.” He stands above me and punches both fists into the air. “Homeschooled, baby. That’s what happens when you have a crazy family of circus freaks.”
And then he launches himself into a backflip.
Up until now, I haven’t been totally sure.
I’ve told myself it’s normal curiosity, this fascination with watching the bodies of the boys around me sprout hair and muscles while mine remains stubbornly smooth and slender.
That maybe the strange, squirmy feeling in my belly at the husky rasp of voices grown deeper seemingly overnight is simple jealousy.
But watching this dark, graceful boy land grinning and dauntless in the dust before me, I’m transfixed by the impossible perfection of him, abruptly certain for the first time in my life.
I’m definitely, definitely gay.
And I’m pretty sure I just met the love of my life.