2. Orion #2
I had no idea who Tara was. “I, uh—”
He switched seamlessly to another subject as I fumbled my words.
I quickly gleaned that he was one of those guys who frequently changed topics and talked about people I’d never met as if I knew them well.
He smiled easily and often, and he clenched his fists in rage when he talked about hockey.
The Vipers had been wiping the floor with his team, the Boston Blades, for a while, and it was causing him a great deal of personal anguish.
“It’s that fucking Decker-McGuire combo, man.
They’re killing us. I thought we might be in with a chance when Luddy retired, but their new center, Miroslav, is even better.
I swear to God, if they take home the Stanley again this year, I will not be okay.
” He leaned in, putting his face a little closer to mine than I was comfortable with, and looked at me accusingly.
That close, I could see a flicker of humor crinkle the corners of his eyes.
“Tell me you’re not a Vipers fan, bud. For real. ”
“I, no, I’m not a Vipers fan.” It was a half-truth. Or like, a three-quarter truth.
My mom and I lived in Seattle for a couple of years before we moved to New York, and I did have a soft spot for the Vipers. I thought they were great, but I’d been born in Tampa, so the Blackeyes would always be my team. “I support the Blackeyes.”
“Oh shit.” He threw himself against the wall dramatically, shoulders jerking as if he’d taken a bullet to the heart. The Blackeyes had annihilated the Blades the last time they played, and it was clearly a sore point for him. “The Blackeyes? The Blackeyes? That’s almost as bad.”
He dusted himself off and headed toward the stairs, shaking his head and chuckling softly.
He kept talking, jumping from topic to topic until my mind felt like a blank screen with a million different windows open.
He interspersed his commentary by asking questions about me.
He asked about the places I’d lived, the music and games I liked.
Every time my anxiety began dropping to a manageable level, he’d hit me with a question that was so personal, my deluded ass got confused and started thinking he might actually want to get to know me.
When I would answer, he’d stop walking and turn to face me with such a penetrating gaze that I forgot what I was saying a couple of times.
We walked past several classrooms to get where we were going, but Jordan didn’t stop or point any of them out to me.
Instead, he took me to an out-of-the-way supply closet and gestured to the door with aplomb.
He checked to ensure no one was around, lowering his voice conspiratorially.
“Now, I’m doing you a solid here, bud, so don’t forget it, okay?
I don’t tell many people about this place…
but if there’s a girl you want to make out with, this is where you bring her.
It’s always deserted, so there’s like no chance of getting busted. ”
I nodded, slightly slack-jawed, and after a quick deliberation, made the decision not to tell him I hadn’t kissed a girl yet. “Wow, er, thanks, man. I’ll bear that in mind.”
From there, we headed to the cafeteria, where a lunch worker rolled her eyes and threatened to report Jordan to the principal, all while biting back a smile and handing over the pudding he asked for.
It was incredible. It wasn’t even nine a.m., and there I was, having a school tour that didn’t suck and eating pudding instead of being in class.
It was so unexpected that I found myself thinking that my mom might be right.
Maybe living in Cape Elizabeth wouldn’t be the worst form of torture imaginable.
Once we’d finished our pudding, Jordan took me to a shadowy corridor near the science lab—apparently also a good make-out spot in a pinch—and then across the football field to the old bleachers.
“Now, the old bleachers are not to be confused with the new bleachers,” he explained. “The new bleachers offer no cover whatsoever. I got detention twice thinking Whitfield couldn’t see what I was doing behind them. But the old bleachers? Mmph, they’re golden.”
I bobbed my head to give him the impression I was absorbing the information and filing it away for safekeeping.
He hung a left before we got back to Mr. Whitfield’s class, steering me down the hallway until we came to a dead end. A door tucked away to one side had a small white-and-blue sign on it.
“Last thing,” he said, gesturing to it. His expression was somber and uncharacteristically serious. “This is the only boys’ restroom on campus that always has paper, so if you need to take a dump, make sure you take it here.”
“I, er, thanks, but I’m a nervous pooper, so the chance of me taking a dump anywhere other than my own home is literally less than zero,” I told him for no reason whatsoever.
Before the words had fully left my mouth, I was flooded with a chilling sense of certainty: I’d be reliving the horror of that moment for weeks to come. Weeks. Maybe months.
I’m a nervous pooper? Oh Jesus. It was going to be years.
As I prepared for my descent into an epic spiral of self-loathing, Jordan’s face morphed in front of me.
The corners of his mouth hitched up, the right side a little more than the left.
Shards of light bounced off his teeth and his eyes slid shut.
His laughter bubbled out of him like something that cost nothing.
A frothy, soft sound crashed into me like a solid brick wall.
A brick wall that melted and spilled down my chest.
If I’d known myself better at the time, I’d have seen the writing on the wall. I’d have known what my reaction meant. But I was fourteen and dumber than a box of rocks, so I had no idea I wasn’t completely straight. Or straight at all.
Okay, okay, fine, I might have had a slight inkling that something about me was different.
I didn’t have the words to describe it, though, or the inclination to try and define it.
All I had were the bare bones of a concept I’d spent a lot of time trying not to think about.
A cloak of confusion that wrapped tightly around me in the men’s underwear section in Macy’s.
An uncomfortable heat that glowed beneath my cheeks in the boys’ locker room and made it hard for me to know where to look.
A blanket of shame that got heavy sometimes late at night.
So heavy that I’d toss and turn, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t kick it off.
“Orion Brent.” Jordan grinned when he spoke and dipped his head thoughtfully, as though he were going to say something of great significance.
His lips and tongue moved in a way that looked controlled.
Almost careful. Almost as though he were tasting the vowels and swallowing the consonants. “I like you.”
The words seemed to take a longer time than usual to land, and I heard them differently from the way I usually heard things. Not in my ears or my brain. I didn’t hear them at all, really. I felt them. In my face. In my lips. In my throat, and all the way down to my knees.
Despite the tour being a lot better than I expected, Jordan and I went our separate ways after homeroom, and my mood quickly plummeted.
It turned out that I was dead right when I said moving to Cape Elizabeth would be torture.
It was exactly as bad as I thought it would be, maybe worse.
I got lost trying to find my way to the science lab and accidentally ended up back at the supply closet.
I was late for class by the time I finally got there, so I was nonconsensually assigned a seat in the front row.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, I was made to pair up for group work—an activity I despised on a good day—with a kid called Mark Dwyer.
He had a habit of breathing through his mouth and a large ink stain on his lip from chewing his pen.
I could tell within minutes that he was the definition of a stage-five clinger.