Now it’s over three months later, nearing the end of December.
I’m still holding. On to what, I’m not entirely sure.
Today in school, during last-period math, a note gets passed around.
It says Tretch Farm + Matt Gooby inside a little heart.
Matt and I just kind of shrug it off. The joke is old. It doesn’t really matter to us, not even when we hear snickering, not even when Mrs. Cook intercepts the note from Spencer Finch’s clenched hand at the front of the classroom.
Mrs. Cook asks me to stay behind after class. She doesn’t ask Matt because, like most everyone, she assumes Matt is gay because he has two gay dads. (He isn’t.) She also believes I’m some hero for being his friend, I think.
“Now, Tretch,” she says. She has on these weird puffed sleeves under a pair of corduroy overalls. “I know how something like this must feel.” She scratches a red spot on her arm. “But I think this kind of joking has gone on long enough.”
You’re right, I think. It has.
“You’re a good kid who doesn’t deserve to have these kind of”—she moves the scratching to her chin—“accusations being hurled at you.” She sends spit flying with her enunciation of “accusations,” and I’m hit.
“I know it must upset you,” she says.
Well, not that badly, I think, wiping my face.
“And it must upset your parents.”
It would, I guess, if they knew.
“So I’d be willing to get to the bottom of this if you wanted.” She holds up the note and I recognize the handwriting immediately. There’s no need to get to the bottom of anything.
“Bobby Handel,” I say. “That’s Bobby Handel’s handwriting.”
Mrs. Cook’s eyes get big. Her nostrils flare.
“But don’t say anything,” I plead. “Please.”
“But, Tretch, I want to—”
“I know you want to help, Mrs. Cook. But, honestly, Bobby Handel’s dad and my dad—”
“Are business partners. I know.” She nods sympathetically.
“Right,” I say. “So I just try to keep the peace.”
“But, Tretch, the school has a zero tolerance policy for bullying.”
“I know, I know.” I hold up my hand. “But it’s not really bullying, Mrs. Cook. You know?”
Mrs. Cook puffs out her cheeks, mimicking her sleeves. Then she sighs. “I guess, if you say so.”
“Plus,” I say, “it’s winter break now. Nobody’s even gonna remember this little note fiasco when we get back.”
She nods, then smiles. “Well, tell your family I said have a merry Christmas, okay?”
“Sure thing, Mrs. Cook.”
“Oh, and your grandparents, too!”
“Oh, I will.” I stand up and pull the desk into place.
“Will you be seeing them over break? Your grandparents?”
I turn around again and force a big smile. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll be sure to tell ’em for ya.” My backpack rests lightly against my shoulder, all my textbooks stowed in my locker for the break. I give Mrs. Cook a final wave, and I am outta there.
Matt is waiting on me in the hallway when I emerge. I pretend not to see and walk right into him, nudging him against the water fountain.
“Whoops, sorry,” I say, pressing a little closer before pulling away. Just because, in that moment, I can.
“Hey, hey, what’s the big idea?” He lands me a flat tire on the back of my sneaker, so I have to stop and readjust. “What’d the Cookster say? She ask you about the note?”
“Yeah. She wanted to do something about it. I told her no harm, no foul.”
“Bobby Handel write it?”
“Yessir.”
Matt cracks a smile. “Tretch Farm,” he says. “Sticking up for bullies since the playground days.”
“Like a champ.” I pump my fist in the air. We’re walking down the hallway toward the exit, past rusted lockers and piles of discarded papers. “Matt, in approximately nine steps we will be freed from this place for an entire winter break. How does that make you feel?”
“It makes me feel—” He takes one giant step forward and kneels in a runner’s pose. “Pyow!” He lights off in a dead sprint, barreling through the double doors of Warmouth High. As soon as he’s down the front steps, he turns around and gives the building the middle finger. Two middle fingers, actually.
“Matt!” I say.
“School’s out, baby!” he cries.
Mom always says, when she hears someone talking smack about the Goobys or about gay marriage being legalized and stuff, “What people do in the privacy of their own home doesn’t bother me.” But talking about the Goobys still makes her kind of uneasy, I can tell. That’s how I’ve been Matt Gooby’s best friend for a year and a half now without ever going over to his house.
As if staying away from Matt’s dads could stop me from being who I am.
I mean, it’s a little too late for that.
A lot of the time, I try to picture the worst thing that could happen, if the word got out about me. Like the whole town of Warmouth exploding in a bright red fiery flame caused by rioting civilians who’ve finally discovered my big gay secret. Or my family might implode—like a submarine when it gets too deep and the pressure’s too high.
I imagine telling them. I play the scene out in my mind. We’ll be in our living room, hardwood with the Chinese-print throw rug, the record player, the TV, and the coffee table (minus the glass vase I knocked over that time I was practicing my dance moves). Mom and Dad will be there, and Joe, too.
“Mom and Dad, I am—” I will say to them.
Then I’ll flake out. “—so hungry. Is there anything to eat?”
“Sure, Tretch. Check the fridge. I just bought some turkey.” Mom will be wearing her turtleneck, the color of darkened Pepto-Bismol, Dad his hunting jacket. I will look at its camo print and hear the sound of duck calls in my ear and feel guilty. Mom will be sitting on the couch, Dad in his easy chair. I won’t focus in on either of them, but instead on the blank spot on the coffee table where the glass vase once sat. Mom’s never noticed it missing. Dad neither. I’ve always thought that was weird.
“Tretch, is something wrong?” Mom will ask.
“Yes,” I’ll say. “There’s something I’m not telling you.”
“What, Tretch?” Dad will lean forward in his seat. “What is it?”
“I practice dance moves when you guys leave the house. I choreograph dances as a hobby.”
“Oh,” Dad will say. “So that’s all that thumping I hear coming from your room sometimes.”
“Once when I was practicing I knocked over the vase that used to sit right there on the coffee table.”
“Oh.” Mom will shrug. “We’ve noticed that was gone for a while.”
“We just assumed you or Joe got hard up for cash and sold the thing on eBay.” Dad will chuckle. “It didn’t mean a thing anyway, just a cheap wedding present.”
“I’m gay,” I’ll say.
They’ll stare blankly. And then I’ll hear a pop! And another. The walls will shake and then stop, and I’ll realize—we’re in the submarine, and the pressure has gotten too great. The walls are going to cave in and crush us. We are going to die. “What’s happening?” Joe cries. A window breaks: one, two, then three. “Save yourselves!” I shout to Mom and Dad and Joe, and they obey, jumping out the windows as the walls come straight at me.
Yes, I’ll think dramatically, it’s better this way.
But, truthfully, it wouldn’t happen like that.
Nope.
Truthfully, Mom, Dad, and Joe would willingly go down with me. They would go down with me any day. No matter what I do, or say, or whatever person I could be, or might be, or am. That’s what makes it so hard to tell them. That they’ll suffer it all for me. The sideways glances at church, at the grocery store and PTA meetings, the shoves in the locker room (“What you looking at, faggot?”), the insults that somehow fly right past me but I fear would peg each of them smack in the gut. They would quietly break friendships with everyone in town who spoke gay slurs, who were anti-gay, anti-Gooby. They might stop church altogether. They might feel the need to move. They would suffer it all and never breathe a complaint.
Because they love me.
“What you thinking about, Tretch?” Mom will ask me.
And I’ll say, “Nothing, Mom.”
Meanwhile, I feel like all my thoughts are shooting out from my eye sockets like slides on a projector screen: Matt haloed by the sun coming in through our English class window; Matt’s dads dropping him off at school, and Matt introducing me; Matt reaching for my hand that day in church and keeping it there; Matt getting into the shower after gym class; Matt lying in my bed as I do homework at my desk, my heart feeling so full, sometimes so full I can’t sleep at night, sometimes so full it aches, like I’m being stepped on.
She can see them all.
Or maybe she can’t.
I mean, if it’s not all that obvious to Matt, then maybe it’s not all that obvious to anyone.