End of the Innocence (18 page)

I
WAS
beginning to wonder if this was such a good idea.

No one was talking to anyone. The people who had already arrived before we had were pretty much hiding in the kitchen. Everyone else sat or stood in the living room looking like they were waiting for a bus. Over on the couch by the door to the dining room, the library guys were talking to each other, no doubt having some kind of debate about comic book characters. Sammy and her friends just stared around the room trying not to look as bored as they were.

“This is bad,” I commented.

Jennifer nodded. “That’s a word for it.”

“We have to do something,” I said to her, pretty much meaning I had to do something.

“Like?” she asked, pretty much saying this was my bed to lie in and if I wanted to change it, I was the one who needed to change it.

I did not have an answer for that.

The music stopped all of a sudden, and Jeff’s voice thundered through the silence, “—but no way Hulk could take Loki if he was ready.” Everyone in the room looked over to the couch. Jeff shrank from the attention. No one dared speak.

I saw an opportunity.

“Anyone have anything good on their iPod?” I asked everyone. No one said a word; the guys in the kitchen ignored me altogether. “Seriously? No one has anything?” I asked again.

Jeremy raised his hand. “I have some mash-ups on mine.”

“Sweet,” I said, pushing him toward the music setup. He handed me over his iPhone. Something like thirty seconds later, I’d changed the setup from the CD player to Jeremy’s playlist. I crossed my fingers and prayed there was some halfway decent music on there.

The first one was this insane mash-up of Britney Spears and Linkin Park that seemed to please everyone. With the music flowing, the conversations started back up again. The drama crew looked somewhat pleased as Jeremy explained he made most of the mash-ups on his computer at home.

One group of people satisfied.

I sat down on the couch with Andy and his boys. “Do you guys have your Magic cards in your car?” Mike nodded. “Go grab them. I’ll make some room on the dining room table.”

Mike and Jeff ran out to grab their binders; Andy gave me a puzzled look. “Do you really think these guys will want to play Magic?”

I shook my head as I stood up. “No, but I’m willing to bet they have never seen the game played before.” I walked over to the dining room table, which was littered with some empty beer cans and a bowl of chips. Kelly’s friends had abandoned the table when they huddled in the kitchen, so I felt safe claiming it for my own purposes.

Jeff and Mike dropped their card binders on the table. Each one was crammed full of collectable playing cards. If you don’t know what Magic: The Gathering is, it’s a game you play with these cards that have monsters on them and spells. It’s like Dungeons and Dragons played with cards instead of dice. The game was boring as hell to me, but the art on the cards was completely badass. Dragons and elves and wizards—the cards were collected by some people for the art alone.

“Use the foil cards,” I told them as they began to pull cards out to make a deck. For every normal card made of paper, there was an identical card made with metallic foil that sparkled under the light. The cards were impossible to find, but I trusted the library crew to have put the time on eBay to make the best-looking deck they could manage.

As they began to toss out piles of metallic foil cards, I knew I had been right.

The three of them set up a game while the guys in the kitchen looked on from the doorway. “If they ask you to explain what you’re doing, use the simplest words possible,” I said quietly. “Pretend you’re explaining the game to your mom.” Andy nodded in assurance as they began to shuffle their decks.

There was a cooler of ice by the kitchen filled with beers, wine coolers, and some Cokes. I grabbed two cans of Coke and headed back to Jennifer and saw Brad was back. They were deep in conversation when I walked up.

“…just yelled at me to get out.” Brad took the Coke I offered him and downed half of it in one gulp.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Kelly,” Jennifer answered with a grimace.

“He’s pissed we’re here?” I asked Brad.

He shrugged. “I don’t know!” he exclaimed, frustrated. “He went on about how I was supposed to come alone and then said he didn’t care about all of them.” He gestured toward the drama crowd.

That was the very moment I knew what was wrong.

“He’s upstairs?” I asked, putting my Coke down.

Both Brad and Jennifer gave me a strange look. “Yeah, his room is on the left,” Brad answered, confused.

“Be right back.” I turned and headed up the stairs. I heard Brad call after me, but I ignored him. I didn’t know much about high school social situations; in fact, I didn’t know anything about them. I had spent the last seventeen years with my nose pressed up against life’s glass, looking at everyone else walking by having a blast while I begged for someone to notice me, even if I did try to stay invisible. If there was anything I did understand, it was unfulfilled longing.

Kelly was lying on his bed with a pillow over his face when I walked in.

“Can we talk?” I asked him loudly.

He threw the pillow off his head and sat up in a flash. “Get the fuck out of my room.” His voice was angry and harsh, but I could tell he had just finished crying.

I ignored his threat, slammed his door closed, and sat down. “We need to talk.”

“Do you want me to kick your ass?” he threatened, standing up.

“Are you in love with Brad?” I asked back. All the blood in his face drained away, making him look like a ghost staring at me with his mouth half-open. That was answer enough for me. “When you asked Brad if he was coming alone, you were asking if he was bringing me or not, right?”

He slowly sat back down on his bed. I waited until I knew Kelly was hearing me.

“Does Brad know how you feel about him?” Kelly shrank in on himself, and I could see how much pain he was in.

“I don’t… I never said…,” he started to say; then he stopped. In a very small voice, he pleaded, “Please don’t tell him.”

I forced myself to stay where I was, because I wasn’t sure how he would take me going over to sit next to him. “Kelly, you can’t live like this,” I said softly. “Sooner or later it’s going to kill you.”

“Not if you don’t tell him,” he assured me quickly. “If you just shut up, then no one needs to know.” The sound of desperation in his voice was like nails on a chalkboard.

“
You
know it.” I shook my head. “You know how you feel, Kelly, and look at you.” He said nothing, but I could see him silently sobbing. “You were going to tell him tonight, right?” I already knew the answer. “If he showed up without me, you were going to tell him how you felt. And then what?” Kelly looked up at me with those bloodshot eyes. “He came out, everyone knows he’s gay. Even if he said that he liked you that way too, what then? Are you willing to come out too? Do you want people to know how you feel?” I spoke as gently as I knew how because I knew he hadn’t thought that far. I knew it.

One gasping cry broke free of his control when he imagined having to come out.

“This is what I’m talking about; this is what’s going to kill you,” I said with as much sympathy as I could express. “Even if you got what you wanted tonight, come tomorrow, how could you live with it?”

He was crying audibly, staring blindly down at his feet, his hands limp in his lap like he had no idea what to do with them.

I bit my bottom lip as I balanced between the feeling of abject terror at what he could do to me with those hands and the overwhelming instinct to give him comfort. Taking a deep breath, I told abject terror to fuck off and walked slowly toward him. Kneeling down in front of him, I slowly reached out and took one of his hands. “Kelly, you at least have to admit it to yourself.”

He refused to look up as he sobbed even harder.

“Are you in love with Brad?” I asked him again.

I wish there were words to convey the raw pain in his face as he looked back at me and exclaimed, “I don’t want to be gay!” before he broke down in hysterics.

I put my arms around him and gave him a hug, not because I was trying to be nice to him, but because there was no way to hear the emotion in his voice and not be moved to help him. “No one is saying you have to be gay.”

He clung to me, his face buried in my shoulder. “But I love him so much!” he wailed. “I always have, since we were in junior high. Before he ever met you, I was in love with him.” His entire body shook with his anguish. “I would have done anything for him… anything! But he started dating girls, and I thought I was a freak.”

“And then he started going out with me,” I said, knowing now where all his hatred had come from.

“Why you?” he asked looking up at me. “What’s wrong with me?”

There was no answer to that, at least not one that would make him feel better.

“I don’t want to be gay. I don’t want to have these feelings!” he said savagely as his voice turned to rage. “I wanna… I wanna be normal. I just want to go get married and have kids and be… and be….”

“And be someone you aren’t,” I finished for him.

He collapsed into my arms again as a new round of tears began to pour out.

“No one is telling you to be gay, you know.”

He looked up at me with outright confusion on his face.

“So you like Brad. That doesn’t mean you’re gay. It just means you have good taste.” I smiled, and he choked back a laugh.

“It’s more than Brad,” he said barely above a whisper.

I nodded, because I had already known that answer. “It’s not the end of the world.” I tried to assure him. “So you like guys; no one is telling you to do anything about it now. We’re less than six months away from graduating, and then you’ll be gone. And if I have learned anything from
Girls Gone Wild,
it’s that college is where people get to experiment with all sorts of things and get a free pass.”

He laughed again, this one a little less miserable than the last.

“But I’m serious, you have to at least be able to say it to yourself. Even if you are never going to tell anyone else, you need to admit it to yourself.”

We stared at each other for almost a minute. Finally he asked. “You mean now?”

I tried not to laugh. “You doing anything else just this minute?”

He leaned away from me, sighing heavily as if the weight of the world was crashing down on him. I said nothing, knowing this was the hardest thing in the world for him to say out loud. Especially with me kneeling there.

“I like guys,” he said, mumbling.

“You like fries?” I asked, cupping my hand to my ear.

“I like guys,” he said a little louder.

“You like pies?” I asked, smiling.

“I fucking like guys,” he answered angrily. “Happy? I think I might be gay.” His eyes narrowed at me. “And that is the most I am going to say.”

I laughed and held my hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay! You said it. Happy?”

His expression didn’t change all that much. “No.” But we both knew he was lying.

Neither one of us knew what to say for a long time. Finally he asked me, “Are you going to tell Brad?”

“Do you want me to?” I asked back.

“No!” He took a deep breath and tried to calm himself. “Please don’t,” he added.

I shrugged. “Then I won’t. It’s none of his business.”

He looked down at his shoes for a moment, relieved. He glanced up at me, an evil smile on his face. “Any chance you could share?”

I flipped him off, and we both burst out laughing.

That was when we heard the screaming from downstairs.

We both stood at the same time. “What the fuck now?” he asked rhetorically.

I heard Brad’s voice screaming over the party and then another voice I was getting more and more used to hearing screaming back.

“Tony,” I said, knowing the night had just taken a hairpin turn for the worse.

We both ran out of Kelly’s room to see what was wrong.

There are a lot of things I look back on and regret in my life, wishing I could change. Suffice it to say the list is long and distinguished, and it covers a variety of embarrassing moments. But right there on the top of the list, the thing I wish I could go back and change the most?

I wish I had noticed that Kelly’s door was slightly ajar when we ran out. It might have changed everything that happened after.

B
RAD

T
HIS
was turning out to be the weirdest ass party I had ever been to.

The drama group was sticking together near the computer Kelly was using for music. For the first time in Foster history, there wasn’t an annoying mixture of country, rap, and hard rock being played way too loud. Instead, the music sounded like it was being spun by an actual DJ, which made conversation flow a little easier.

The blue-haired girl seemed to be watching over an iPod while her friends half swayed to the music. A couple of Kelly’s friends had asked them what song was playing or where they got the mix that was playing, which was about 1000 percent more conversation than those two groups had shared in the last four years. Andy and his crew had begun playing Magic, which, of course, drew some attention from the guys hiding in the kitchen. One by one they walked over to examine the cards and watch the game until there were half a dozen guys surrounding the table watching them. They hadn’t asked them yet how the game was played, but it was just a matter of time.

“Did he really pull this off?” I asked Jennifer.

She seemed just as shocked as I felt. “Sure seems that way, doesn’t it?” She looked over at me. “There is no way you deserve someone like him.”

She was making a joke, but we both knew it was the truth.

I let the breath I hadn’t even known I was holding the whole night go and began to believe we might just get through this night intact.

Which was the exact moment the front door slammed open, and Tony came walking in with Josh Walker and a few other guys behind him. “The party has officially starte—” Then he saw who else had showed up.