Chapter 9 #5
“I’m free then,” Rikker said. “What do you think, G? Do we need to leave before noon?”
Sometime yesterday he’d begun calling me “G” again, just like the old days. I liked it. “There’s no rush,” I told him. “I’ll need to grab a shower at some point, but that’s the only thing on my to-do list.”
Rikker lifted his chin toward the stairs. “You can go now. Breakfast will be another fifteen minutes.”
As I climbed the stairs, I could hear Rikker and his grandmother gossiping.
“Was that boyfriend of Daphne’s there? The one with the bar through his eyebrow, who says ‘fuck’ every other word?”
“Bruno?” Rikker chuckled. “Didn’t see him. So maybe he’s out of the picture.”
“Maybe she came to her senses. Daphne’s a smart girl. I always hoped she was just experimenting on him.”
“I hope so too.”
My time in Vermont came to an end before I was ready. A couple of hours later, Grandma Rikker drove us to the rental car place, and Rikker went inside to pick up his reservation. I leaned forward from the back seat of the truck to thank her for having me as a guest.
She swiveled around, squeezing my forearm. “Any time, dear. I wish you boys had more vacation days. I really do. These last few years with John have been such a gift to me.”
I smiled, because you couldn’t look at the love in her watery blue eyes and not smile. “I’m sure it isn’t always sunshine and roses,” I said, trying for a joke. “He probably leaves the toilet seat up.”
“I had two boys before him,” she said, patting my arm. “I don’t even notice anymore.”
I saw Rikker coming outside again with a set of keys in his hand. “I think we’re all set to go,” I said.
But when I went to open the door, she grabbed my hand. “You take care of yourself, Michael Graham,” she insisted.
“I will,” I said.
“And don’t forget to vent the plastic containers before you nuke those meatballs I made you boys. So they don’t explode.”
Chuckling, I got out. “Thanks for everything!”
She blew me a kiss after I slammed the door.
“I want to do that again some time,” I admitted when we were on the road. “Your grandma’s place is so relaxing.” Rikker was so quiet after I said it that I had to wonder if I’d overstepped. “I mean… I had fun. That’s all.”
“I did, too,” he said quickly. “But I think it’s fascinating that you say you were practically climbing the walls at home, yet Gran’s place is like an oasis.
Because she’s the only person in the world who probably suspects you of being gay.
” His eyes flicked over to give me a glance.
“Because you’re visiting me. Not for any other reason. But that’s, like, backwards. No?”
When I opened my mouth to argue, absolutely nothing came out.
Because Rikker was right. Most of the time I walked around in a panic trying to act like a straight guy.
In Vermont, I spent my time twerking at a queer dance party and making out with my gay friend in his grandmother’s truck.
Then I slept for nine hours straight and woke up feeling like a superhero. It didn’t make a lick of sense.
“What did your parents say about my news story?” he asked suddenly. “Did they see it?”
I gave a big sigh. During the days I’d been at home, I’d ducked out of several conversations about those damned articles. “They said people were talking about it at church. That’s where my mother heard about it.”
“But what did your mom say about me? Was she, like, shocked or anything?”
“She didn’t seem shocked,” I said slowly. This whole topic freaked me right out. “She asked me if you were okay, and if I thought that Coach handled it well. I told her I thought so. Both things.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah.” The truth was that Mom tried to talk to me about it. But I ran out of the room every time it came up. And I sure as hell didn’t tell her about the Saint B’s game.
“What do you think your mom would say to me if I walked into your house right now?” he pressed.
“Um… hello John?” I didn’t like where this conversation was headed. Because it didn’t matter that my parents weren’t bigots like Rikker’s parents. I didn’t want to be their gay son.
“I bet she’d offer me cookies and milk.” He was smiling now, picturing it. “She was always good for a bag of Oreos.”
“Sure,” I said quietly. “My mom is cool. But that doesn’t mean she’d want to walk in on us in the basement. Or explain to her friends at church…” I trailed off. Because the more I spoke, the more obvious it was that I’d thought through all of this. So many times.
Rikker let a couple of miles go by before saying anything. “You know, my parents tried to convince me to go to one of those places where you pray the gay away.”
“Really?”
“I refused to go. But you know what’s funny?” he started chuckling to himself. “You know what they do at those weekend retreats? They cuddle.”
“What? You mean, like, they put you with a girl?”
“Negative. They sit everybody down on the floor in pairs, and make you cuddle a man. They have this batshit theory that gay comes from not getting the right fathering. So if a man holds you all weekend, you won’t crave that anymore.”
“You are pulling my chain.”
He shook his head. “While I do enjoy pulling your chain, this is the God’s honest truth. I met somebody who went to one of those things. He said what he really got out of it was the knowledge that he really liked cuddling men.”
Grabbing the headrest behind me, I laughed. “Best scam ever.”
“Right? That will be two thousand dollars, please.”
“What do they do if someone gets a stiffy?”
“He said you were just supposed to ignore it. But I pictured something like a fire brigade. ‘Boner alert in sector three! Get the hose!’”
He made siren noises. And I laughed as hard as I used to when I was fifteen, and we were busy deconstructing the inanity of whichever superhero movie we’d just seen.
And that was why I was sitting in a car with Rikker right now.
I laughed more easily today than I ever could with my other friends.
Rikker already knew I was a freaking mess, so I didn’t have to expend any effort pretending that I wasn’t.
In spite of the fact that we had a whole lot of baggage, there was nobody on earth who knew me like he did.
It was terrifying and liberating all at once.
The miles were rolling by, though. And pretty soon we’d be back at school. Back to the grind of trying to do well and figure my own shit out at the same time. And I couldn’t help but wonder how Rikker did it. “How do you walk into that locker room every day knowing what they say about you?”
Rikker didn’t move his eyes off the road. “I dunno. I just do it. Because walking in is better than not walking in, I guess.” We rode in silence for a while. “I know I’m not a good advertisement for the product.”
“What?”
“I don’t make being ‘out’ look like fun.
On the other hand, I don’t worry anymore if people are going to find out, you know?
I don’t ever do that crazy math I used to do.
If I left my fuck buddy’s room by eleven, I figured people wouldn’t assume we were hooking up.
But twelve-thirty seemed risky.” He laughed.
“None of it makes a difference if the guy emails your picture to the coach.”
“Is that picture still in circulation?”
“Why, you need a copy?”
I snorted. “Very funny. I’m just thinking that even the guys who are cool to you in the locker room probably don’t want to see that picture on any news websites.”
Rikker groaned. “It must not be out there anymore. Because that would have already happened. It was a bad shot, thank God. The camera focused on his hip instead of me. So you can only see the back of my head, which is blurry. If I hadn’t had the team tattoo on my shoulder blade, Coach might not have even believed that it was me.
” He reached back to touch his shoulder for a second.
“The minute I got kicked off the team, I had that thing covered up. Now I’ve got this big… ”
“I saw it.” Rikker had a kick-ass black widow spider on one shoulder blade. And around her, a web spread across his back. “I like it,” I admitted. (But that was an understatement. The tat was sexy as hell.)
“Me too. It was all the artist’s idea. The red hourglass on the spider’s back is the Saint B's ink showing through. I’m not trying to be deep or anything, but I like the fact that a spider swallowed that shit up.”
“Just be careful not to ever get your picture taken again. You’d need a monstrosity to cover up that spider web.”
Rikker laughed. “I know, right? Ow.”
The rental car ate up the miles, and we passed from Vermont into Massachusetts. As we passed exit 27, Rikker held up his middle finger toward route 2, and the approach to Eastern Massachusetts.
I didn’t have to ask which school lay in that direction. “I wish there was such a thing as trading at the college level. We could just trade Big-D to Saint B's.”
“I could get behind that,” Rikker snorted.
“How do you walk past him every day and not punch him in the teeth? The shit that comes out of his mouth…”
Rikker sighed. “Yeah. See, even though I think he’s a moron and a giant, gaping asshole, I don’t think it’s curable. He’s squicked out by me, and that comes from somewhere deep inside. That’s why I don’t punch him. Because he can’t help being a dick like I can’t help being gay.”
“You can’t use the word ‘deep’ with his name in the same sentence.”
“Fair enough.”
“And I don’t buy it, anyway. Because if he’s squicked, that means that in order to be your friend, he has to be able to picture you having sex, and like that image. So now who’s the pervert?”
He laughed. “That is a hell of a point, G. Did you ever think about saying that to his face?”
Fuck, no. Because I am the biggest pussy that ever was.
“Never mind,” Rikker sighed. He knew already that I was a coward. I’d been proving it to him all my life. “Maybe you’ll find this funny. Big-D got up in my face in the locker room once, asking me how many girls I fucked before I decided I was gay.”
“Christ. What did you say?”
Rikker got that slow grin on his face, the one that always made it hard for me to think straight. “I asked him how many dicks he sucked before he decided he was straight.”
“Get out of town! And he didn’t take a swing at you?”
“Too many witnesses,” Rikker shrugged. “The funny thing is that I am a little squicked out by the idea of having sex with a girl.”
I laughed. “You ever try it?”
He shook his head.
“Aw, Rikker is a virgin,” I teased.
He shook his head. “If you say so. Do you like it?”
“Yeah,” I said. But then I qualified my answer. “When I’m drunk and very horny. It helps if she’s really into it.”
“You get off?”
“Usually. Unless I’m really wasted.” Too wasted to remember the finer points of whatever gay porn I’d watched earlier in the evening. I’d never shared this crap with anyone. But alone with Rikker in that car, I couldn’t stop spilling my guts.
“What’s your plan?” he asked, his eyes still on the road.
“What do you mean? For today?”
He chuckled. “No, moron. For life. Girls? Guys? Girls and guys?”
“I don’t plan.” And that was certainly the truth.
“But I do hope. I hope I meet some girl who really does it for me, you know?” God knows I’d been auditioning them the last three years at Harkness.
There was just one girl who had always been able to make me hot for her.
And that was only because she was game to do some things with me that most girls didn’t like to do.
And that meant that I’d had to stop sleeping with her. Because my enthusiasm for her extra-credit activities gave away more clues about me than I was comfortable revealing.
My phone chimed with a text from Bella. Where R U?
Think of the devil, and she appears.
I didn’t answer Bella’s text. Because my story was going to be that I’d flown into Hartford today. Every truly enjoyable day was one that required a lie to explain. How depressing.
A minute later, I heard Rikker’s phone chime. “That will be Bella. I think she’s trying to figure out if anyone is going to be late.”
“We’ll be on time,” he said, changing lanes. “Bella is a little hung up on you. You got that, right?”
“Not true,” I said immediately. “She plays the field. Can’t imagine her getting hung up on anybody.”
He gave a fake cough into his hand. “If you say so.”
Bella was, however, worried about me, because I’d been such a wreck all year. Rikker wouldn’t see that. And I wasn’t going to explain how his reappearance in my life had turned me inside out. I was pretty much done with that topic.
Traffic began to pick up as we headed toward the Connecticut border. We passed the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield. And the two of us made the mutual decision that even if time and money were in infinite supply, we still had precisely zero interest in visiting it.
We drove through Hartford, its high-rise buildings whipping by.
And then reality began to set in, at least on my side of the car.
My twenty-four hour trip into Rikker’s life was coming to a close.
The exits began to tick downward in number and I wondered how this ride would end.
“So, where’s the rental car place in Harkness? ” I asked.
“At the train station.”
That made plenty of sense. I pictured the two of us getting out of the car there, while half the hockey team wandered by on their way back to campus.
“Quit squirming,” Rikker said darkly. “I’ll drop you off somewhere else.”
At the sound of those words, the tight feeling I was so used to feeling inside my chest returned. “Thanks,” I made myself say.
I am such an asshole.
He didn’t say anything else for the last few miles. But he did pull up at a gas station just on the edge of town. Fishing a credit card out of his wallet, he looked over at me. “You can walk from here, or I’ll drop you wherever you want.”
“Here’s good,” I muttered. “Let me give you some money for gas.”
He waved me off. “You bought the drinks last night.”
Last night. Already that seemed like a hundred years ago. From the back seat, I grabbed my duffel.
Rikker leaned against the car, waiting for the tank to fill. He gave me a salute.
I forced myself to pause there for a moment, even though my eyes wanted to flick into every passing car, looking for people who might be watching us. “I had a great time,” I said, meeting his gaze.
Those brown eyes turned away. “I know you did.”
The tightness in my chest squeezed like a fist. “I’ll see you at practice.” But we won’t speak.
“See you,” he said as the gas nozzle clicked off. He gave it his full attention.
There was nothing left to say. So I just turned and walked away, zipping my jacket against the cold.
It wasn’t until later that I realized I’d left behind the food Grandma Rikker had sent back. She’d packed a plastic tub of her cooking for each of us, but I’d left mine on the back seat. It had smelled great, too. And now I wouldn’t get a chance to enjoy it.
Like so many other things I craved.