End of the Innocence (2 page)

“You don’t have to apologize for Brad, you know,” she said to me.

I looked over at her quickly. “I’m not; I’m just saying I’m sorry that happened to you. He’s a big boy and can apologize for himself.”

She gave a little half smile. “Good answer.”

We both opened our books as Mrs. Graizer walked in.

See what I mean? Not better, but definitely different.

I watched Sammy as we went over the previous night’s homework. Her hair wasn’t the only thing that was unique about her. She wore dark-blue eye shadow that had some kind of glitter in it, and I could see her lips were not black, just a deep blackberry-blue. The thought of coming to school dressed like that gave me the same sensation as the thought of walking out my front door naked. She looked awesome, there was no doubting that, but the bravery it must take to know everyone was looking at you and yet stay true to yourself—

“You’re staring,” she said out of the corner of her mouth, still looking ahead at the blackboard.

“How did you know?” I asked her in a whisper.

A small smile. “You dye your hair bright blue, you start to get a sense for it.”

I looked down at my book. “Sorry, it’s just a very cool look.”

She looked over at me, and I could see her searching my face for signs of my mocking her. I looked back at her to show I meant every word I had said. “Thanks,” she said after a few seconds of silence. “I’ve lived in Foster for seventeen years, and no one has ever said my hair looked cool.”

“Well, then the people around here are idiots,” I said firmly.

She shook her head and went back to looking at the board.

I had the feeling I had just made a friend.

B
RAD

A
S
we headed into Christmas break, things seemed to get easier and easier.

Kyle thought it was because of what I had said to the school board, I thought it had more to do with anticipation of two weeks off from school. This close to Christmas, staying mad was pretty much impossible; even my dad, who was sure I had just pissed away a chance at college, had mellowed out some.

My very public display of fuckery—Kyle’s word, not mine—had actually worked to my benefit since everyone knew what kind of trouble I was in now. And since I’d spoken out in public, my dad didn’t dare do something horrible to me like, say, taking away my car. He had to act the smiling, supportive dad of the underdog student who was just fighting for his rights.

Or some garbage like that. I didn’t pay much attention to the spin he put on everything for his own benefit when he talked to his buddies.

All I knew was that I still had my guy and my Mustang, and people had stopped spitting at me as I walked by. I was going to take that as a win all around. I also think it had less to do with my big showdown with the school board and more that people just didn’t have the energy to be disgusted with someone for so long without reason. Everyone had been shocked, everyone had been outraged, and now? Who cares? I had seen it happen more than a few times with other kinds of blowups but was kinda surprised to see it applied to me for once.

The Monday after the surprise board meeting, I was told I could change out in the coach’s office for PE and practice, which was the administration’s way of saying “sorry” without, you know, actually saying the words. Personally I was ecstatic, because I felt like I was going to explode if I couldn’t work out regularly. Of course, that was less of a school problem and more of a “me” problem.

See, Kyle is a virgin.

I know that came out of nowhere, but let me explain. It’s not like Jennifer and I had sex every day, but she was pretty good about making sure my… “needs were met.” Wow, that sounds wrong, but that was the way she referred to it. She was under the impression that I was an average guy and needed sex to keep me in line, so I was used to getting some now and then. More now than then, if you catch my drift.

Kyle, on the other hand, was pretty new to being physical. We made out, and I was enjoying finding new ways for him to lose his mind, but we have not actually had real sex.

Even though I was kind of unsure what real sex with a guy was about.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen porn and know where everything goes; it’s the whole setup beforehand that has me confused. I mean, who’s the girl? I hate saying it like that, but I mean, the thought of being the one who was… well, you know. I was scared to death. We hadn’t brought sex up, but I could tell he was worked up too. Almost every second we were alone, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. I think he wanted to go further as well, but he had even less idea how this worked than I did.

So I spent more time in the gym than normal.

But, as time passed, things got better. I knew we had turned a corner when I was in Mr. Powers’s civics class. Mr. Powers had a thing about splitting us up into pairs to do things. I’m not sure why, but each teacher had their own thing they thought made their class “cool.” For some it was pulling our desks into a circle; others grouped us into fours and fives. Mr. Powers did pairs. Especially for review, he had half the class pick a person from the other half of the class. Then we were supposed to learn from each other. In reality, everyone hoped the other one had been paying attention. Pairing was a colossal waste of time, made even more of a waste of time since my fall from grace.

The only thing worse than sitting with someone and pretending to do school work was having no one willing to sit with you pretending to do school work. It sucked, but I had grown used to just sitting by myself and ignoring the people around me snickering under their breath at me.

“You need a partner?” a familiar female voice asked.

My head snapped up as my mind realized it was Jennifer talking to me. “Huh?” was all I could reply.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” she announced, sitting down across from me. There was absolutely no sound in the classroom, and I realized everyone was staring at us. In a whisper, I asked her, “What are you doing? Everyone is watching us.”

She gave me that Mona Lisa smile that drove straight boys all over town crazy. “Since when are you afraid of people staring?”

She was right. Before I’d come out, I had been used to people staring at me. When I was on the baseball field, there were more eyes on me than most people can imagine. Having a classroom full of students watching me should have been a cake walk, but for some reason I knew I was shrinking in my chair.

She laughed infectiously when she noticed my discomfort. “Wow! You have changed,” she noted, opening her book. “I never thought I’d see the day Brad Greymark was at a loss for words.”

“I can talk,” I said, pretending to open my book as well. “I just don’t know what you want.”

Her smile didn’t waver, but I could see the change in her eyes when she looked at me. “Maybe I just wanted to talk. Is that a crime?”

I sighed and gave up, since the talking with Jennifer thing was happening whether I wanted it to or not. “Okay. Talk.”

We just stared at each other for almost a minute. I assumed she was trying to find the words in which to tell me I was a complete asshole, so I waited for her to explode on me because, to her, I’d really been worse than that. Finally she just sighed and shook her head. “Man, you make it hard to like you sometimes.”

That didn’t sound anything like what I was expecting. “Say what?” I asked.

“I’m just saying, you were the one who didn’t tell me he was gay for three years, then came out and embarrassed the fuck out of me, and now
you
have an attitude?” Her voice didn’t sound angry, but I knew her well enough to know that when Jennifer sounded like she was joking, she really wasn’t.

“I just assumed you didn’t want to talk to me,” I admitted after a few seconds.

“I didn’t, but that’s beside the point.” She laughed, and I could tell by the fake tone she was as nervous as I was.

“So why are you talking to me, then?” I ventured, hoping I wasn’t pushing my luck.

She shrugged again and began tracing circles in her notebook. “Maybe I’m done being angry? Maybe I’ve gotten over it?” She gave me a shy look. “Maybe no matter how pissed off I was, I can’t deny that Kyle kid brings out the best in you?”

Once again I found my flabber completely gasted.

She saw my confusion and smiled. “I’m not going to lie. The first few weeks, I hated both of you because you never smiled at me like you did at him. But when I heard they were kicking you off the team, I lost it.” She was still tracing circles in her book, the only outside indication she was as nervous as I felt. “You practically carried that team to state last year. For them to kick you off for that….” She broke the point of her pencil off, and I could see the tip of anger that was the only indication of a huge iceberg of fury that lay just below the surface.

She grabbed another pencil out of her bag and started making circles again. “Anyway, I realized a lot of people were mad at you just to be mad.” Another small smile. “I mean, I had a ton of reasons, but they didn’t, and that ticked me off.” She stopped making circles. “So I decided ‘what’s done is done’. Besides, you guys are too cute for words, so why stay mad?”

I had thought I felt bad about what I’d done to her before, but seeing her sitting here, burying the hatchet like this, I was stunned by the fact that I really didn’t know much about Jennifer at all. “I am so sorry about hurting you,” I blurted out, the emotion beginning to rise inside me. “You deserved better than that.”

Her mouth was a crooked grin that could make lesser men buckle. “I know.” We sat, both of us doodling and turning text pages while we figured out what to say next.

“So, Christmas break’s coming up,” she said casually.

“Yeah, can’t wait,” I answered, not sure where this was going.

“Kelly’s having The Party…,” she trailed off.

Oh shit, The Party.

While my brain scrambles to find the ability to make words again, let me explain that Kelly’s parents are some of the worst people I have ever met. People have to get a license to fire a gun, drive a car, even to sell hot dogs on the corner, but any idiot can have a kid. If there were two people less suited to be parents than mine, they were Kelly’s.

His mother was one of those ladies who had no idea how to act her age. She still wore clothes that would have looked tacky on girls with half her mileage. She had a Snookie-like tan that made her skin look more like tanned hide, and I am not even going to go into her hair. Worse, she took every opportunity to try and flirt with any of Kelly’s friends who were stupid enough to come over to their house over the summer. To have a woman who is as old as, if not older than, my mother tell me I was “growing up nicely” and then give me a long look up and down was just about the creepiest thing I could imagine.

His father was even worse.

There is a certain type of man who can only judge his value based on how many women find him attractive. He keeps count of how many girls he thinks he can have. That number translates exactly to how much of a man he is. I was used to seeing this behavior in guys my own age, but to see it in a man as old as my father was just gross. And that was Kelly’s father: gross.

I don’t know if he was oblivious to the fact he was balding and overweight and at least three times the age of the girls Kelly knew, but his dad would leer at any girl no matter how old she might be. That kind of thing was just sick. Kelly wasn’t a girl magnet to begin with, and after it got out how pervy his dad was, it was near impossible to get a girl to come over to his house at all. The only exception was The Party.

Every year, his parents went out of town right after Thanksgiving and left Kelly alone at their place. Now you’d think a teenage boy throwing a house party when his parents left for a few days might be a stereotype. In Kelly’s case, it wasn’t like that. You see, his parents knew about the party and let Kelly throw it every year. They would leave him some money and then drive off for a week, knowing their teenage son was alone and having a party for half of Foster. They wanted to be known as the cool parents, the ones the kids liked and trusted. As with my parents, appearances were all that mattered, and not in a good way.

Like I said, these people shouldn’t have been allowed to buy a dog, much less raise a child.

All moral objections aside, The Party had become legendary in the town over the last four years. It had grown year after year, and now that it was Kelly’s senior year, it was rumored to be the best one yet. I had known all this, of course, but since everything with Kyle and me had gone down, going to The Party had been the last thing on my mind.

Until, you know, like now.

“Did I lose you?”

I looked up and saw Jennifer staring back at me. I wondered how long I had spaced out and shook my head. “No, just completely forgot about it.”

“Color me shocked! Brad Greymark actually forgetting a party!” She was teasing me, but she was still telling the truth. I had been the first person to bring up having a party. I loved being able to drink, hang out with my friends, and not have to clean up after the chaos, so of course, I pushed for other people to throw them all the time.

I pretended to skim through my textbook, turning pages at random as I ignored her gaze. “Yeah, I’ve been in the middle of other things; parties I can’t go to aren’t that important to me now.”

“Why can’t you go?” she asked.

I looked up at her, openly incredulous. “Um, for about a thousand reasons, but the most important being I wasn’t invited.”

She rolled her eyes and went back to her circles. “Like anyone is ever invited. Now you’re just making up excuses.”

I leaned forward and said in an angry whisper, “How about because the three guys who held me down and beat the shit out of me in the locker room are going to be there, and I don’t want that happening to Kyle. Ever.”

When she looked up at me, I could see the abject horror in her eyes. “That really happened?”

“I have the bruises up and down my abs to prove it.”

She tried to cover her shock, but she was clearly pissed. “More reason you should show up,” she said, not looking at me. “You stay away, all they are going to do is think they won.” Now her eyes met mine. “Show up and let the people who are really your friends get a chance to meet the real you. And if anyone tries to hurt you or Kyle, they can answer to me.”