Chapter 6 Acting
Acting
I’ve been told by my friends and teachers that I’m a good actor.
For Drama class last year, we performed Our Town, a play by Thornton Wilder, and I was cast as Si Crowell, a high school kid who takes over his older brother’s job of delivering newspapers.
It was a small part, but I apparently impressed people.
I don’t know how. I just memorized the words and spoke them.
(However, when Nash went to school here, he also was in a production of Our Town, and he got showered with compliments for playing the Stage Manager, which is pretty much the lead role and he was in practically every scene.
Me: always in my damn brother’s shadow.)
Anyway, I guess I’m going to put my acting talent to the test right now, right in front of Oscar Bustamante, in this small and oppressive restroom.
I start laughing, trying my best to make it sound not fake.
“Oh, my God,” I say, with a big smile on my face. “My brother sent me the funniest video!”
I start laughing again, pretending that I can’t stop, pretending that I’m even having trouble breathing.
“Yeah?” says Oscar, suspiciously.
“Yeah, yeah, this shit is hilarious!” I’m super enthusiastic. “Look, look!”
Still laughing, I pull my phone out of my pocket and open up YouTube.
I guess laughter is infectious because Oscar starts laughing too. (Or is it for some other reason?)
I say, “You have to see this, man! You’re gonna crack up! This is so funny!”
Then, I furrow my eyebrows, trying to look disappointed.
“Ah, shit, my phone died.” I surreptitiously shut off my phone. “I’ll show you later.”
Oscar shrugs. “Oh, well.”
He seems to believe me, seems to buy the lie that the gay porn I was watching was actually some viral video my brother forwarded to me. (My brother has never forwarded me anything.)
That was close. Too close. Note to self: stop beating off to gay porn at school.
“What you been doing all lunch?” Oscar asks.
“Just studying. I’m gonna go find Emma. Come with me.”
Oscar turns away from me, moves to a urinal, and unzips his pants. “Nah, man, you two are all annoying when you’re together.”
I turn to a sink, look down, and wash my hands. “What do you mean?”
“You two always calling each other ‘baby.’ Kissing on the lips gently like you in middle school. When you gonna hit that shit already?”
“Tonight, actually. Emma and I talked about it. We’re banging tonight.”
Normally, I wouldn’t offer up that kind of private information so easily because I try to be as sensitive to Emma’s feelings as I can.
But this is the perfect counterpoint to the gay porn Oscar just heard coming from my laptop.
What better way to erase suspicion of my homosexuality than to assert that I’m about to have heterosexual sex?
In the mirror, I notice that Oscar hasn’t leaned into the urinal. He stands several significant inches back. From my angle, I can catch a glimpse of the thick head of his penis.
“For real?” he asks. “You fucking?”
“Yeah.”
“Dude!” Oscar exclaims.
When he finishes peeing and zips up, I quickly look back down into the sink. He moves to his own sink and starts to wash his hands.
“Emma wants it bad,” Oscar says. “I can see it in her eyes.”
We both dry our hands with paper towels.
Oscar raises his palm for a high-five. “My man!”
I slap my palm against his, perhaps a little too hard.
“I was starting to worry about you,” Oscar says.
“Worried why?”
“My girl was blowing me the first week we went out,“ he says proudly. “Second week, we were fucking.”
“I know.”
“I mean, she’s thicc. You know how I can’t resist that.”
I nod.
“And I know how you love them supermodel-looking girls. So when you got someone like Emma, I don’t understand how, after six months, you still . . .“ Oscar starts pecking the back of his hand with little kisses.
I punch him in the arm. “Shut up, dude.”
Oscar laughs, as I follow him out of the restroom.
As we’re walking down the hallway, we hear a male voice behind us: “Cuál es la gracia?”
Oscar and I turn around and see Victor Chaviano.
Oscar says to him, “Hunter se va a jamar a la jevita esta noche!”
They both laugh.
I took a couple years of Spanish as my foreign language elective, but I don’t quite understand what they’re saying because I think they’re speaking in Cuban slang.
Like Oscar, Victor’s background is also Cuban.
But whereas Oscar was born in the United States, Victor was born in Cuba.
He and his parents moved to California sometime during his elementary school years, when the U.S.
government was making it relatively easy for Cubans to legally come into the country for the purposes of political asylum.
(All that has changed drastically—Cubans now have to go through a much more difficult process to be allowed into the U.S.)
While Oscar’s good looks are rugged and stereotypically “macho,” Victor is classically handsome, refined, like he stepped out of a silent movie or something. He’s also on the track team, and he plays just about every sport, and is great in all of them.
Victor smiles wide and exposes his straight, white teeth. He pats me on my arm. “Good for you, Hunter,” he says with a faint accent. “The boy becomes a man, eh?”
“How you holding up, Victor?” I ask, because I know Victor recently broke up with his girlfriend, Julisa, who goes to a different school. He caught her cheating with some guy who’s like a senior in college.
“It’s okay,” he says. “I try to get my mind off her by just focusing on track and school and my writing.”
I don’t know much about it, but apparently Victor is “Wattpad famous.” He’s written several stories, mostly horror, and they have like millions of views.
I know a lot of the girls at school read his work, cheer him on at track meets, and practically have to pick their tongues from off the ground whenever he walks by.
So I don’t think it’ll be long until he finds another girlfriend.
Andrew appears from around the corner. When he sees the three of us, his face lights up.
As he passes us, he says, “Hi, Hunter. Hi, Oscar. Hi, Victor.”
“‘Sup,” I say.
Oscar and Victor lift up their chins at Andrew.
Once Andrew is out of earshot, Oscar says to us, “Man, that dude is so gay.”
Victor nudges Oscar’s elbow and says, “Less competition for us. We don’t have to compete with him for hot girls.”
Oscar nods. “True that.”
I look over my shoulder and catch Andrew checking out all of our asses. He quickly turns his head away and keeps on walking.
Suddenly my phone rings. I look. It’s my brother. That’s strange. He never calls me.
“I thought your phone died,” Oscar says.
I hit the “ignore” button. “I guess there was enough juice for a phone call.”
My cell rings again.
“That’s weird,” I say and hit “ignore” again.
Then, Nash sends me a series of texts:
—“Where are you?!”
—“Pick up!”
—“Hunter!”
—“Answer me!”
—“Bruh!”
Oscar tries to look at the screen of my phone. “That’s a lot of juice for a phone that’s dead.”
I try to laugh it off and shove the phone back in my pocket. “I know! Verizon, am I right?!”
Fortunately, Victor unwittingly comes to my rescue when he says, “Yup! Verizon sucks!”
We all nod, including Oscar, and once again we’re walking.
What the hell does my brother want? What can be so urgent? He sounds pissed. Did he find his stained underwear that I hid underneath my mattress? Or worse, did he find my spy cam in his room? Or even worse, did he find his shower videos online?
I feel one of my anxiety attacks coming on. Like I said, they usually happen at random. Like, they’re not tied to anything. But this attack here, the reasons for it are obvious: Oscar’s suspicions, my brother freaking out. I might just lie down and die right here.
As we all head toward the quad, I notice Oscar watching me from the corner of his eye, a blank expression on his face, the look of someone who doesn’t know what to think of his best friend.
I spot Emma sitting on the grass with a bunch of her friends. When she sees me, she winks and bites her lower lip, a supposedly seductive gesture that’s meant to turn me on and get me excited about what’s going down tonight.
In my mind, I picture an imaginary coin. Heads: this is going to be the worst day of my life. Tails: everything will be fine. I imagine flipping the coin in the air and catching it.
Heads.
Fuck my life.