Late November (3 months since leaving Texas)
Aaron started the tradition when we were fifteen. My parents were out of town again—I’m not even sure they knew it was Thanksgiving; though they wouldn’t have cared had they realized what day it was. Aaron’s aunt and uncle raised him, and they were mostly too busy working and keeping up with their own lives to pay a lot of attention to their nephew.
Back then I had a credit card with no limit. I mean, probably it had a limit? Except there was no way I could have reached it unless I’d gone out and bought a car, and I didn’t need to because my parents had already bought one for me. So when Aaron came up with the idea, I funded it, and we invited everyone we knew who didn’t have a family to celebrate with.
November in Texas is usually brown and chilly, but the forecasts that year were calling for sun and warm weather over the Thanksgiving week, so we met up at a park on the lake and Aaron got the grill going. He made burgers, ribs, corn on the cob—nothing traditional. Everyone who could bring a side did, with the only rule being no turkey or cranberry allowed.
And thus the Orphan’s Feast was born.
But the limitless AmEx is long gone, so there’s no way I can afford to go home for Thanksgiving this year.
Funny, though, how Texas is still home, even though there’s just Aaron and a few other friends waiting for me.
Maybe because there’s nothing in Ohio to feel like home.
“Okay, so, I’ve been here for almost four full months, and every day you do the exact same thing. Same routine. You get here at the same time, work out, tuck yourself away for a break midmorning, then go back to training for another ninety minutes. You vanish every day exactly at noon—I assume to go to class—then come back at five. Five days a week. I could set a watch by you, dude.”
I’ve gotten Jeremy’s attention. It’s starting to become a bit of a thrill, making those dark eyes focus on me. Most of the time he pretends like I don’t exist.
He’s straddling a bench right now with a textbook in front of him. It looks serious and scientific, and I want to ask him what class it’s for, but he sneers and says, “‘Dude’?” like the word is personally offensive.
I don’t wait for him to invite me to sit, because I’d be waiting forever if I did. I swing my leg over the bench and face him, planting my hands flat in front of me. “You ever change things up?”
“I’m not sure what bothers me more,” he finally says. He has a unique way of speaking, like he’s considering every word very carefully and examining it before it leaves his mouth. It’s the same way he dives: every single dive broken down into individual parts before being strung together. I love listening to him, though mostly I have to listen in when he’s talking to Andrey or Val. “The fact that you think there’s a need to change something that’s already working perfectly, or that you’re watching me that closely.”
Andrey’s nutrition plan says I need to be snacking throughout the day and especially after a workout, so I dig an apple out of the pocket of my jacket and bite into it loudly. I can tell it bothers him by the way his lips go thin and his eyes narrow, which is why I did it. I’m becoming addicted to whatever little reactions I can wring out from him. And Jeremy’s eyes flicker-focus on my mouth, my hand, my throat, before the faintest hint of red appears on his cheeks.
He finally turns his eyes back to his textbook, and I smirk because I’ve won. He thinks I’m not competitive, but he’s wrong: I’m competitive as hell when I actually care about winning.
“So, you and Valerie.” Jeremy’s shoulders tense and his eyes freeze on the page. “You two dating?”
Valerie is gorgeous. Even I can see that, and she’s definitely not my type. She and Jeremy would make a good match—both of them haughty and distant and perfectionists to the core. Except he never stares at her the way other guys do . . . never glances down her body when she’s wearing her bathing suit.
I’m from Texas. We know how to read closeted boys.
“No.” He says the word cleanly, still not looking up.
Another bite, and his eyes flicker to the side. He’s doing his best not to glance at me, but he’s obviously unpracticed at being subtle.
“I don’t get you.” Now it’s my turn to be surprised by his words, because they’re low and heated. There’s a light flush on his cheeks, and his hands are clenching on his thighs.
I swallow. “What’s not to get?”
He thumps the book closed and stands, staring down at me. I meet his gaze, and watch his Adam’s apple bob. Yeah, not straight. “If you put even half as much attention into your diving as you do into figuring out my daily schedule and social life, you could be competing this time next year.”
The temptation is there to admit how little I care about competing as a diver. What I say instead is, “You know, I researched that Greg Louganis guy.”
He stills.
“They say he’s the best American diver of all time.” It’s my turn to swallow, and I can hear the sound so clearly that Jeremy must hear it too. “You compared me to him. You said I had the potential to be just as good.”
“You do.” He bites his lip like he wants to take the words back the second they leave his mouth.
I hesitate before continuing. “He’s also gay. Louganis, I mean.” Jeremy said that Louganis was his hero, and something tells me that it’s not only the four Olympic golds that made him say that. I stare unblinking into wide brown eyes. “Like me.”
Jeremy may as well be carved from ice. His breaths are so shallow that his chest is barely moving, and he’s gone completely white.
It takes him a few attempts to speak. “Probably don’t wanna go around admitting you’re a fag in this sport.” His voice is barely audible, but every word is so precisely sharp that it cuts like glass. “It just makes you look like an even bigger failure.”
He grabs his textbook and flees while I’m still trying to recover.
Damn.
Jeremy gets what he wants after that conversation, because I avoid him until we break for the holiday. What he said was hurtful, but for once I make myself wait and think instead of jumping in with anger.
Val and Jeremy take off after morning practice on Wednesday. The entire campus empties out, students vanishing for the holidays. Even Andrey heads off with a brief wave while I’m finishing my cooldown.
The silence is nice for the first fifteen minutes, and then it starts to eat at me. I’ve never done well with being alone, although I’ve gotten used to it while growing up in a big, empty house where the only people around are the housekeepers who don’t care one way or the other about a sullen boy.
But this feels different. Maybe it’s because I’m missing Orphan’s Feast for the first time since its inception. Maybe it’s because there’s a thin layer of frost outside, the sky is gray, and I miss Texas with its mild, sunny winters.
Whatever it is, it’s making Jeremy’s words rattle around in my head like a pinball machine. It doesn’t help that I’m stuck in my tiny dorm, so I pull on my jacket and escape. A walk might help me sort through my thoughts.
I wander the empty natatorium later that afternoon. There’s a group of older ladies swimming laps, and a bored lifeguard on duty, but it’s otherwise abandoned.
The way that Jeremy lashed out with homophobia when I came out to him isn’t surprising. Me and Aaron have a word for people like him. We call them skeletons—people so far into the closet that they die there, decompose, never willing to step out into the light. Jeremy is the worst type of skeleton, though, because he’s not only afraid . . . he’s hateful.
Normally I wouldn’t let anything a skeleton said bother me. I used to get upset when I met someone who spewed hate to cover their own fear, try to reason with them. “It’s the twenty-first century, be proud of who you are!” Aaron is the one who taught me to ignore them. That nothing I said or did would pull them out of their hiding spot, so I just had to let them shrivel up.
But Jeremy . . . his words do bother me. They started as a tiny seed inside me and are growing into something bigger, and before I know it, my nails are digging into my palms and I’m seething. Because he thinks being gay makes you weak, that it’s simply one more thing to add to the tally of Reasons Why Brandon Won’t Succeed.
He’s wrong.
I storm home and rattle around my dorm for an hour. I want to punch something, but I’m pretty sure I’d break my hand if I tried to put it through the painted cinderblock wall. I pace the room: six steps one way, ninety degree turn, seven steps the other. Prison cells are probably bigger.
My eyes catch on the two pieces of paper hanging up over the bed. Andrey’s schedule, and the nutrition plan he proposed.
Every day is so strictly regimented that it is a prison. Morning workouts, lunch, class, afternoon workouts, dinner. Types of food to eat for breakfast, for snacks, for post-workout recovery.
“Fuck them,” I say aloud. The words feel good, echoing back off the walls. “Fuck them, and fuck Jeremy if he thinks being queer means I’ll never amount to anything.”
When I got here, I had no intention of following all of the rules and guidelines they tried to set. I went to practice, I trained, and I did the bare minimum to keep my scholarship. Until recently, I didn’t have a reason to bring my A game and really try, because I didn’t give a damn about proving myself.
I give a lot of damns now. And I’m going to prove to Jeremy that gay and weak aren’t synonymous.
I yank the schedule off the wall. Today is Wednesday. I’m supposed to be diving with Andrey this afternoon, but of course that was canceled because of the holiday. Doesn’t mean I can’t dive on my own though.
My backpack is still lying on the ground just inside the door, where I dropped it when I got in. I unpack my sweaty workout clothes, throw in a bathing suit and one of the little magic towels that everyone swears by.
Then it’s back out into the cold, cutting across campus, and into the humid, chlorine-heavy pool.
And I dive. I dive off the three-meter springboard until my knees wobble, and then the five-meter platform until my triceps and shoulders are sore. I thought I’d been working hard in the last few weeks, but now my muscles ache. I’m going to find my limits, and then I’m going to figure out how to push past them.
In the shower after, I think about the dining-hall food, and how I can adapt to meet the strict nutrition plan. After this, I’ll go to the computer lab and watch diving videos from past events. I can’t improve enough in a few days to make a difference, but by the time Jeremy gets back from Thanksgiving, I want to have my game plan set up.
“You want a competition?” I stare at Jeremy’s locker after, dripping onto the floor. “I’ll give you a competition.”
I doubt this is what Jeremy meant when he wanted me to apply myself, because I still don’t care about winning some medal, or getting to the Olympics. But I’ll compete against him and against his bullshit idea that I’m nothing.
He’s just a skeleton hiding away behind a closed door. I’m standing out in the sunshine, and I’m ready to shine.