8. Orion #2
When he spoke that time, I felt a shift in Jordan.
A tension in him that slackened and then hardened notably.
The atmosphere at the table changed, and I knew he was going to speak before he opened his mouth.
Part of me knew it was necessary, and maybe I’d been waiting for it because I knew all too well who Jordan was by then.
I knew how he’d been raised and what he thought was important.
At the same time, my anxiety was running rings around me.
Zac was massive, and a couple of the other guys there played football too.
I didn’t want Jordan to get on their bad side.
It didn’t stop him.
“You know that when you talk about girls like that, Zac,” Jordan said, “people only laugh because they’re uncomfortable. No one is impressed by you.”
Zac’s mouth pulled into a tight pucker and his eyes bulged in shock and then fury. His expression held for a second before melting into a big shithead grin. “Relax, bud. It’s a joke, okay? Geez. Talk about taking life seriously.”
Zac’s deflection was an attempt to garner support from the rest of the guys at the table, to make them laugh, to give them a social cue that told them exactly how they were expected to react. My heart dropped, thinking everyone would follow the script, and Zac would get away with it.
Jordan didn’t allow that though. He stepped in before anyone else had time to defuse the situation. “A joke, huh?” His eyes were hard, jaw set in a way I hadn’t seen before. “I don’t get it. Explain it to me.”
You could have cut the tension at that table with a knife. Not a single person there knew how to react. As a group, we’d deviated so far from the normal bounds of a relaxed social interaction that no one knew where to look or what to do next.
I felt the heat of Jordan’s body next to mine. I felt the weight of his intention. His desire to be a good man like his father. To be a son his mother was proud of.
It’s fair to say that I was scared of pretty much everything at the time.
I hated drawing attention to myself and hated saying the wrong thing, but in the split second after Jordan said what he said, something fell into place for me.
Jordan was my ride-or-die. I knew that. It was well established by then.
He’d defended me many times, for many different reasons.
Right there, right then, I realized Jordan wasn’t only my ride-or-die. I was his too.
“Yeah, Zac,” I parroted with a lack of hesitation that surprised the hell out of me. “I don’t get it either. How exactly is slut-shaming funny?”
Around us, the mood at the table changed again. Hesitant laughter and confused smiles faded. Eyes turned to Zac, who was left fumbling his words as he tried to explain the situation away.
One of the other guys at the table, a junior like Zac, cut him off before he could make any headway. “I’m not really a fan of talking about girls like that either, to be honest. I think we can do better.”
From there, several of the girls piled onto Zac at once, and they didn’t pull their punches. They told him exactly what they thought of him. It was a very enjoyable scene to observe.
The group dispersed not long after that. Zac was the first to leave.
Suddenly, it was quiet, and Jordan and I were the only ones left at a table with bunched-up napkins and straw wrappers strewn all over it.
He was still sitting next to me, hands on his lap under the table.
One of them was balled into a fist, and the other was resting on it, trying to hide a tremor that ran through it.
I looked closer and noticed the sleeves of his sweater were quivering.
He was breathing hard and his entire body was trembling.
“You’re shaking,” I said quietly.
His eyes were shinier than usual. There were shadows in them, and the yellow in the center looked like it was alight. “I was scared, but I said it anyway.”
My heart stopped.
He was scared, but he said it anyway.
To me, Jordan was larger than life, but really, he was only a kid at the time.
Just a boy who was scared of what people thought of him, like everyone else.
He stood up for what he believed was right anyway because he knew his voice mattered.
Because he knew how insidious and poisonous the venom of words like Zac’s can be, and he couldn’t let it stand.
Because he understood how the world works and knew there are things we can do to make it better.
The wave of affection that flowed through me was bigger than I was.
It was bigger than Jordan too. It was a physical thing.
A massive, visceral force with strong arms and legs that wrapped all the way around me.
It was different from the affection I usually felt for him.
It flowed deeper and squeezed tighter. It was different because it wasn’t normal affection.
It wasn’t fondness, friendship, or even hero-worship.
It was pride.
True and deep pride. The kind of pride that swells and takes your breath away. The kind of pride that inflates in your chest and makes your heart feel too big for your rib cage.
I was proud of Jordan. Truly. Deeply. Not only because of what he said to Zac. I was proud of who he was as a person. I was proud of who he was and what he’d done that day, sure, but more than that, I saw a clear outline of the man I knew he’d become, and I was proud of that version too.
He looked at me and smiled. It wasn’t a burned-paper smile, or the kind of smile I hear in his voice before he speaks. It wasn’t a smile that told me anything about who he was. It was a smile that told me who I am to him.
“Wanna know why I did it?” he asked.
“I know why. It’s because of the patriarchy and all that stuff your mom said about silence and sha—”
“Nah, bud,” he said, tilting his head and letting the word roll around the back of his throat. “I’ve known that stuff for a while, but I haven’t had the balls to do something like that before.”
“So why did you do it?”
He pressed his lips together and gave me a small nod. “I did it because you were here, Orion…because I knew you had my back.”
By that time, Jordan had hugged me lots of times. He would often put his arm around me when we walked places together. Sometimes I struggled and slapped him away playfully, and sometimes I let him do it, but I’d never initiated physical contact with him.
I did then. I couldn’t help it.
I threw both arms around him before I had time to talk myself out of it or think it through. I held him as tightly as I could. “I’m proud of you, Jordy.”
He didn’t miss it. Jordan doesn’t miss things like that. Never has, never will. “Jordy, huh?”
I released him and gave him a little shove. “Shut up. It doesn’t mean anything.”
All signs of smiles and unseriousness evaporated and his eyes became a little damp at the corners. “It does to me.”
I snorted and exhaled heavily, but I didn’t correct him because he was right. It did mean something. It meant the same thing to me as it did to him.
It was the moment, the exact second in time, when Jordan stopped being a friend I was fond of and became a friend for life.
It was a big deal, a beautiful moment, but it was overshadowed by what happened a few minutes later.
We left the burger place and started strolling down the street, walking side-by-side. “Can I tell you something, O?” Jordan asked.
“Sure.”
“You know I love my sisters, right?”
“Yep.”
“’Cause I do. I really do. I’m super lucky to have them, and I know that, but…
I’ve always wanted a brother. When I was little, I used to beg my mom and dad for one all the time.
I did it for years. Seriously, I didn’t stop asking for a brother until a few years ago when it occurred to me that I was basically asking my parents to have sex, and it hit me how gross that was.
” He shuddered exaggeratedly, shaking the image off.
“I still had this feeling though”—he rubbed his chest with one hand, as if there was an ache—“this little, I don’t know, this little longing for a brother, but I don’t feel like that anymore. ”
“How come?”
He slung an arm over my shoulder and curled it tight, getting me into one of his chokeholds. “’Cause”—he tousled my hair with his free hand, forcing me to double over as I tried to fight him off—“you’re the brother I’ve always wanted.”
My face was hidden from view because of the way he was holding me, and I was grateful for it because when he called me his brother, my entire body reacted.
Everything, and I really do mean everything, I’d been hiding from came roaring to the surface.
It rushed up, exploded, and changed from a murky suspicion to a crystal-clear knowing in under a second.
Every confusing feeling I’d had about Jordan up to that point solidified and took shape.
The big thing that made me want to be invisible and not let anyone get close to me burst to life.
It was born right there on a quiet street, on a normal afternoon in Cape Elizabeth.
It was a real, living thing, and for the first time, it had a name.
I knew who I was. I knew who Jordan was to me too.
And he wasn’t someone I loved as a brother.