Chapter 31 Debbie Gets Screw-ged
Mustang,
Perseus? A giant scabbard? I don’t have a sword that size, but I do look pretty good in shorts.
I’ve never been kissed—not on New Year’s Eve, never.
My counselor told mom and dad they should let me go to OKC for New Year’s Eve! (Assuming I continue to make progress in the meantime.)
Dad is PISSED!
I’m smiling now, by the way…
Adam
Wednesday, December 13, 1995
Matt stood at the urinal—listening to Christmas muzak crackling from the grainy speakers overhead, his piss hissing as it smacked the porcelain and splattered down the drain.
Finals were over.
He’d been up cramming most of the night, guzzling Mountain Dew to stave off sleep.
He’d spent the last two hours in an essay-writing frenzy, spilling facts onto the page. Facts about pre-Civil War American History. Jamestown, Williamsburg, Stamp Acts, and tea parties.
Or was it pee-tarties?
He was exhausted, running on empty. Hadn’t showered or eaten breakfast. Wore day old underwear and the least-smelly socks he’d been able to rummage from his laundry hamper.
All that remained was to deliver a Christmas present to Debbie, mail one to Adam, then head home for the holidays. He dreaded the heading home part.
He thought about Adam and sighed.
His and Adam’s paths at MCU had been eerily in tandem from the beginning, like entangled particles. Both were freshmen, closeted gays, and had been fast-tracked for membership in the GM.
In the normal course of events, they each would have joined the GM and worked their way around to a handshake. Whether that would have been the beginning of a love story like Nicholas’s and Bradley’s, fifteen years and counting, anyone’s guess.
Maybe that handshake would just have been the thread that linked them in friendship, weaving their story into the tapestry that incorporated the rest of the GM, all of them connected by silky filaments of semen into a sort of mystical blood brotherhood—like the bond between Achilles and Patroclus in the The Iliad.
Colton’s treachery had altered the trajectory of events, like throwing a rock into a pond and watching the expanding ripples, each, in a way, caused by its predecessor—all resulting, proximately, from the rock and the malicious hand that threw it.
Colton’s reporting Adam to the dean had been the rock.
Everything after that had been a ripple.
Adam’s expulsion. His near suicide. Gay Chapel.
Colton’s smug SGA resolution congratulating the administration on having bagged another fag.
Matt’s passioned rebuttal calling for a caring response.
Matt’s road trip to deliver condolences to Adam.
The heart-stopping moment Adam had entered the room.
And now, finally, after months of correspondence, the two of them would usher in the New Year with a first kiss. Two weeks and four days were all that remained on the countdown clock in Matt’s head.
The muzak switched to a new song, “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.”
The bathroom door creaked open.
Someone stepped to the urinal to Matt’s right, fumbled a zipper, then loosed a drippy, drizzly stream.
“What’s up, Buttercup?”
Matt bristled. Only one person used that word—Buttercup: Colton Langley, MCU’s version of Seuss’s green gremlin.
Matt acknowledged Colton with a curt nod.
Colton finished pissing, shook himself, zipped, and went to the sink.
“Since it’s the Christmas season, I’m here to offer you a gift,” he said.
Matt hurried to tuck his dick back in his jeans, then make a hasty exit. Even in its current fog, his brain flashed the warning: Beware of Coltons bearing gifts.
“Keep your dick out and stay facing the wall,” Colton barked. “I don’t want you sucker punching me again.”
Matt sighed. Decided to play along—for now. “What’s the gift? And what’s the catch?”
“The gift is that I’ll leave your little friend alone, as opposed to getting her kicked to the curb, which is what I should do. There is no catch, except that it’s polite for you to give me a gift in return. I think you know what I want.”
Matt stood there, facing the urinal, his dick dangling like a misplaced participle. He calculated whether he could whirl around and catch Colton before he escaped into the hall outside. Pummel him like a Posadas pinata. The odds weren’t good. The door was near the sink where Colton stood.
“What ‘little friend?’” Matt asked.
Colton sneered. “Don’t play coy. I’ve seen you with her in the cafeteria several times. Everyone has.”
Ava? Matt thought of his fake girlfriend, Ava, aka his beard, for whom he was also a beard, her being lesbian and all. Lesbian girlfriend, in fact, of Molly. Matt and Ava dined together once or twice a week.
“You’d better not hurt her,” Matt hissed.
Colton dried his hands with paper towels.
“That’s up to you—whether she gets hurt or not.
Now listen up. I’m sure you remember that little box of letters William had, the ones he claimed were from me.
I want them. All of them. The box, too. The whole ‘kicking your friend to the curb’ business is already in motion.
Bring me the box in the next thirty minutes, and I’ll put a stop to it. ”
ShitFuckDamn!
Matt balled his fists in anger, felt his face getting hot. Colton Langley was not your average, run-of-the-mill bully. He was someone for whom life was just a giant Whack-a-Mole game, and he wielded the mallet.
Matt had worried something like this would happen when William had brandished that little box full of fake love letters from Colton.
Rocks and ripples got blurred where those two were concerned. Sure, Colton had thrown the first rock, with the whole breaking William’s heart and coming to MCU. Lots of ripples caused by that splash. Plus, a dozen other rocks in the intervening three years.
That box of fake love letters with the implied threat from William to release them to the public? Big fucking rock.
And now a Tsunami of a ripple threatened both Matt and Ava. The only way to spare her was to hand over something that didn’t exist.
“This is between you and William,” Matt said. “Negotiate with him. Threaten him. Leave me and my friend out of it.”
“I tried talking with William, if you’ll recall. No dice. The time for talking and playing nice is over. Now, hop to it. William lives in Covenant Hall. That box has to be in his room. Get it. I don’t care how. The clock is ticking.”
Matt agreed with Colton on one thing: the time for playing nice was over.
Delivering a beatdown in the men’s restroom of the Bass University Center was reckless and unlikely to succeed.
But there weren’t other options and time was slipping away.
Colton had to be stopped before he destroyed another life.
Matt spun on his heels and hurled himself in Colton’s general direction, intending to body slam the jerk into the wall.
It didn’t work out as planned.
Colton escaped into the outside hall.
Matt landed in a tangled heap on the floor.
He scrambled to his feet, enraged, ran into the hall.
Colton was nowhere to be seen.
“I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” brayed from the overhead speakers.
“Screech!”
Molly! Matt turned to face her.
“Have you seen Colton?” he asked, panting. “Where’s Ava?”
Molly appraised him. Stared at his crotch. Scowled. “You might want to put the rooster back in the chicken coop.”
Matt looked down, realized his dick was still sampling the air, like a dog poking its head out the window of a moving car. He tucked it back in place, zipped, asked Molly again if she’d seen Colton. Where was Ava?
Molly answered no to the first question. Ava, she reported, was already headed home for the holidays.
Matt slowed his breathing, tried to think where Colton could have gone. This was not over. Not by a long shot.
“Let’s get some coffee,” Molly suggested. “You look like you could use some. You can tell me what’s got you so worked up. Plus, there’s something I need to show you.”
Matt hesitated, flummoxed. Colton’s thirty-minute deadline was ticking away, like a time-bomb that needed to be de-fused. He needed to be doing something—anything—other than drinking coffee.
Molly must have read his mind. She said: “You need to get your head on straight and quit acting like a dumb jock. C’mon.”
Matt followed her to the cafeteria. It was a choice he would replay in his mind afterward, wondering if things might have turned out differently had he not done so.
A few minutes later, they sat at a small table overlooking the quad. The cafeteria was a ghost town. There were three other students scattered about and one employee lazily mopping up a spill. The whole campus was shutting down for its long winter’s nap.
Matt quaffed his coffee, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, then told Molly about his bathroom encounter with Colton. He rushed through the story, ever-conscious of the tick, tick, ticking time bomb. How much time was left? Twenty minutes?
Molly listened while dumping more sugar into her mug. She stirred it noisily. “What exactly did Colton say that made you think he was talking about Ava?”
“Like I just told you,” Matt said, with more than a hint of frustration. “He talked about my ‘little friend.’ Said he’d seen us in the cafeteria together several times. Said he could get her ‘kicked to the curb.’ That sounds like Ava to me.”
“This is exactly what I meant with the dumb jock comment,” Molly said. “Ava’s not the only female you’ve been seen with in here. There’s me, obviously, and—”
“Who?” Matt interrupted.
“—Starts with a ‘D’—”
Matt still didn’t get it.
Molly rolled her eyes. “Hello? Debbie!”
“Debbie? Who works in the Registrar’s Office? She’s not a student!”
“Exactly,” Molly said. “She’s staff. And what group has Colton been targeting lately? Faculty and staff, that’s who. You’d know that if you hadn’t been a lovesick puppy dog lately.”
“I’m not lovesick.”