Openly Straight (4 page)

That exercise sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t, depending on the crowd. But sitting in Mr. Scarborough’s writing seminar, it occurred to me that this was that lesson in action.

The bell rang, and we started packing up.

Mr. Scarborough said, “Before you go, I wanted to announce that I’m the advisor for the school literary magazine, and we’re looking for new staff people, so let me know if you’re interested. As for this class, you’ll all keep journals. I’ll read them. I will not share them with other students, and I will not ask you to read from them. So you may feel free to write whatever you feel is important. But it must be about you. Your life. Tell me who you are.”

Great
, I thought. How the hell was I going to do that?

At our first soccer practice, Mr. Donnelly lined us up against a wall in the gymnasium. He was our dorm adviser at East and a history teacher. Maybe thirty or thirty-five, he appeared to be going for older; he wore big wire-rimmed glasses that seemed like they were meant to look bookish. His black hair was parted on the side and combed over the top of his head.

“The Romans dominated the world for hundreds of years. Does anyone care to guess why?” he asked as we sat in front of him on the gymnasium floor.

I almost raised my hand. Legions, right? Military strategy and organization? I didn’t remember a ton from tenth-grade history, but I knew a few things still.

“Leg strength,” he said. “No one had thighs like the Romans.”

That was not what I’d expected to hear. It got me interested, at least.

“The proof was in the famous marathons, discovered by the Romans, as you might recall. Did you know that the first Roman army ran all the way from Damascus to Constantinople? The French, and the Germans, and the … Danish … couldn’t keep up. Those Romans had stamina. Do you know what that means? Do you?”

I looked around. Were there hidden cameras somewhere? Were we being punked? Even I knew the Greeks had invented the marathon. I looked over at Steve, but his expression was totally blank. I caught Ben’s eye, and he looked away, but not before a flicker of something crossed his face. I smirked. I wasn’t the only one thinking this guy had a few of his facts wrong.

“All’s I know is the following: Stamina means never having to give up. Stamina means your body never builds up lactic acid. We’re going to get stamina this year, boys.”

I made a mental note to look up the word
stamina
later.

He had us lean up against the wall in a sitting position. I was fine for about thirty seconds, even when some of the other guys began to grunt. Then I felt it. The shaking, in my quads. I closed my eyes as Donnelly kept walking back and forth in front of us. He yelled, “Be like Mark Anthony and, uh …” Even with my quads throbbing, I almost laughed as he struggled to think of another name. “And all the other Roman leaders!” A few more painful seconds. “C’mon. Don’t you dare give up. First three to fail are doing laps the rest of practice. Hear me?”

You can do anything for five minutes. This was something my
dad used to say, and it was true. When I took swimming lessons as a kid, I hated the cold water of the lake we swam in. But if I didn’t pass, we wouldn’t be able to go Jet Skiing. Dad said: “Five minutes is nothing. You can do anything,
anything
, for five minutes.” So I did. I pretended I had a wet suit on, that the freezing water against my sides was a second skin, protecting me from the elements. And I started the crawl stroke and I didn’t stop until I heard the whistle.

“And then there were four,” I heard Donnelly say, and I opened my eyes and realized I’d tuned things out so much that I didn’t know how long it had been. My legs shook something fierce, but I decided to keep going. I could win this. I could be the best. I could …

“Nice try there, Goldberg. All’s I know is that’s a nice effort by the new guy. Way to show up on the first day.”

I picked myself up off the gym floor, my quads still throbbing. I watched Steve, Ben, and Robinson, the final three. Robinson crashed soon after I did, and then there were two. Ben’s eyes were closed, and I saw a bead of sweat travel down the side of his face. His legs were like horse legs. His calves, grapefruit sized and finely matted with light hair, bulged and trembled. I wasn’t surprised when Steve fell first.

“Ben Carver. He outplayed, outwitted, outlasted you all,” Donnelly said.

Wasn’t that the
Survivor
TV show motto? I’d have to ask Albie and Toby later. Nah, probably not the right kind of survivor show.

We went out to the soccer field. Natick has some of the best athletic facilities around, and that includes a gorgeously manicured soccer field surrounded by a track. I worked out with the midfielders. I’d always liked to run, and they did the most running.

We scrimmaged. The ball came my way, and I dribbled up the sideline. Steve came over to defend. I knew I couldn’t get around him, so I faked as if I were going to try, and when he bit, I kicked the ball across the field. I had no idea whom I was passing to, but at least it seemed like the right thing.

As luck would have it, Bryce was there. He stopped the pass by catching it with his chest, dribbled around a defender, and hit the top of the net, easily past the diving goalie.

“Beautiful, Bryce. Great, great pass, Rafe. That’s the way,” shouted Donnelly.

I was glad I’d made a positive impression, even if it was dumb luck. I was clearly not the best player, but I tried hard, and I wasn’t the worst either.

I found Ben as we walked back to the locker room. “I think some long-passed Natick history teachers are turning over in their graves right about now,” I said.

He smirked. “Wait until he starts using World War II analogies. He gets the Axis and the axis of evil confused.”

“Sounds excellent,” I said as I held the door for him.

“Some of the more disgruntled upperclassmen made a big stink about it last year. Natick is famous for pushing these sorts of things under the table. We win games, so why worry about the miseducation of the soccer team?”

“Were you one of the disgruntled?” I asked.

“Nah. I was gruntled.”

That cracked me up. I liked Ben. He was smart. So was Bryce, who had used the word
scads
in our writing class. I hoped I could make them see that we should be friends. And just as I was thinking
up a good comeback, he was gone, hustling down the aisle to his locker.

As I started to get undressed, I saw the first few guys head into the shower area. I felt my heart beat faster as I glimpsed my teammates walking by, some wrapped in towels, some with towels draped over their shoulders. In Boulder, as the gay guy, it was an unspoken rule that I wouldn’t gawk at my fellow athletes. That would be considered rude, you know? And, basically, I just figured it was a tradeoff: They accepted me, I didn’t stare at them naked. It worked.

Here, no such unspoken pact had been made; why would there be? And I felt a little guilty and a bit tingly, entering the sacred shower room with my fellow straight teammates.

The thing about Natick guys was this: They really were genuinely nice. I had never been in a shower room that wasn’t filled with name-calling and insults. Once
faggot
had been taken away from my Boulder teammates, they’d found other ones — dumbass, shit breath, dick face — that they used with abandon. Here, the guys were mostly talking about, of all things, soccer.

“We gotta be better this year,” Steve said. “Schroeder’s gone, but Bryce is our boy.”

I looked over at Bryce. It was almost like he wasn’t there; Steve had spoken about him in the third person rather than the second. It was weird.

“Add Rafe and his speed and we got a serious shot to win it all, right?”

Steve turned to me and smiled, which made my heart spin even more, since he was just about perfect, physically. It gave me a chance
to look at him, since he was looking at me. He had a six-pack, the kind I was not quite muscular enough to have.

I looked over at Ben. He was silently soaping and rinsing. His torso was thick — not fat, just bigger — and well sculpted. The curve of his back was graceful, his neck strong.
Teen People
would probably choose Steve, but something about Ben made me think he was even more attractive.

Steve continued to work the room, and I realized it was basically his space. Whatever Steve said or did, people listened. I’d never been part of a group like that, so it was interesting, like a National Geographic special on wolves that I might watch with my dad.

And I was part of the pack.

Albie
and Toby came into our room while I was reading
A Separate Peace
for lit class that night.

“Hey,” I said, pretending to be engrossed in my book, even though my interest in Gene and Finny was pretty low. I had gotten along with Albie and Toby over the weekend when we’d been in the room together. They were weird but harmless. Albie said strange things and never laughed, which made me a little uncomfortable. Toby said even stranger things and laughed a lot. I hadn’t seen either of them much out of the room, and when I did, a nod was all I’d give them. I liked them fine, but clearly if I had to choose between my jock friends and these two, it wasn’t going to be a tough choice.

“Greetings and salutations,” said Albie.

I saw he was wearing huge camouflage shorts, and what happened next was not exactly expected. He dug four Styrofoam bowls out of his desk drawer and put them on the desk. He then stood on his toes and proceeded to turn his pockets inside out. Lucky Charms poured into the bowls. Each pocket seemed to fill two bowls to the
rim. There was some overflow that landed on the floor, and without thinking, I stood up to go over and clean up the spill, but Albie put out his hand to stop me. He then bent down and picked up the cereal bits that had landed on the floor and placed them in the garbage.

“Progress!” I said, smiling, and he bowed at me.

“Here goes nothing,” Toby said, and he walked over to the windowsill, where a single, wilted rose drooped in a clear glass vase. Toby picked up the vase and poured the clear liquid — water, I supposed — into the Styrofoam bowls. The cereal pile got higher.

“Ew,” I said, unable to suppress my disgust. As if Lucky Charms weren’t disgusting enough, adding
flower water
?

“Puts hair on your chest,” Toby said, grinning. “Want some?”

“I’m afraid to ask,” I said.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” he said.

“Vodka?”

Toby nodded bravely. “They kick you out for this,” he said. “Hence the vase.”

“Lucky Charms with vodka?”

“Frosted Russkie Charms. They’re Bolshevik delicious!” Toby sang. “Think of it like an after-dinner drink, a dessert wine.”

“Actually, it’s more like an alcoholic dessert,” Albie said. “It’s not a drink.”

“It’s more like an alcoholic’s dessert,” I said, and Toby giggled.

I passed on a bowl. Albie shrugged and said, “More for us,” and we three sat there, a strange trio.

“So what’s your thing, Rafe?” Toby said, rolling marshmallows around in his mouth before crunching on them.

“My thing?” I asked.

“Tweaker, womanizer, historical reenactments, poetry slams, model airplanes, VH1.” Toby listed these choices as if they were the only possibilities.

“Um,” I said.

“Weed whacking, porcelain doll collecting, Ferris wheels,” added Albie.

I just stared at the guys, totally speechless.

Albie looked at Toby, and for the first time since I’d met him, he dropped the aloof act, smiling.

“He doesn’t know what to make of us,” he said.

“Good,” Toby said, smirking. “I like to be a mystery.”

In Boulder, I’d be friends with these guys, I realized. Maybe not the
Survival Planet
stuff, but they were funny. They said things that surprised me constantly. I decided to play along. What Steve and Zack didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Plus, it would be fun to go against the label they’d given me. Blow their minds a little.

“I like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and taking photographs of nuns on Segways,” I said.

I was thinking back to the time this summer when Claire Olivia and I had seen these three nuns riding on Segways in the Pearl Street Mall. The rest of the crowd was being very Boulder, very “nothing to see here” laid-back, so Claire Olivia and I followed the nuns and waited until they parked their Segways and sat down on a bench. Then we went and talked with them and found out they were an honest-to-God (no pun intended) group of local nuns who traveled on Segways. For fun. They liked us, and, of course, I got to snap several pictures of Claire Olivia riding on a Segway amidst a group of nuns. (A
cloister
of nuns, we later decided, when we got to talking
about words meaning groups of things, like
a gaggle of geese
,
a murder of crows
.)

“That’s two of the rules of comedy right there,” Albie said, picking up the bowl he’d emptied of cereal, lifting it to his mouth, and slurping the vodka. “One: Nuns are always funny. Two: Segways are always funny. That’s comedy gold.”

“I’m a regular Tosh.0,” I deadpanned.

Toby laughed. Albie frowned. “He relies on profanity and sex innuendo,” Albie said. “Very much in violation of the rules of comedy.”

“Albie loves rules,” Toby said, rolling his eyes. “Rules and of course survival shows on television, and thinking up new ways to abuse and humiliate jocks. Present company excluded.”

“I never get to use them, though,” Albie said. “I don’t like being killed.”

I looked at Albie, who was not looking at me, and I realized he was nervous about being around me. His bravado and humor aside, here I was, this supposed jock he was rooming with. He had no way of knowing that I’d been anything other than a jock all my life. I felt bad for him, so I decided to say what the old Rafe would say. Pre-Natick Rafe.

“I hear ya. In Boulder, my best friend and I used to come up with ingenious plans about how to make the FBITs pay.”

“FBITs?” Albie asked.

“Frat Boys In Training.”

He looked at me, sized me up again. I could tell he was sort of thinking I was one.

“We call them Jockheads,” Toby said. “Rhymes with
blockhead
?”

“Yes, I got that,” I said. “Extremely clever.”

This made Toby laugh.

“Well, anyway, this school is all FBITs,” Albie said.

“I had dinner with them a few times over the weekend. Steve and Zack?”

Albie raised his eyebrows. “Impressive,” he said. “I mean, in a very unimpressive way.”

“I like them,” I said.

“I gotta piss like a racehorse,” he said. “And by that I mean while galloping.” He galloped out of the room.

So there we were, me and Toby, alone in the room. I crossed and uncrossed my legs. Toby kept eating his Frosted Russkie Charms. He had an earring in his right ear, and he wore a tight white T-shirt. His voice wasn’t effeminate, but he was definitely different.

“I guess if you’ve talked to the Jockheads already, they probably told you about me,” he said, squirming in his seat. “I’m gay. Everyone knows and I’m fine with that.”

I swallowed. “No,” I said. “They had not told me that.”

“Oh,” said Toby. “Um … awkward.”

All summer, I’d gone over every scenario in my mind in terms of gay stuff at Natick. I had firm plans in place. I was going to be label-free.
Don’t ask, and I won’t tell.
The only way I would actually lie was if I were asked directly, “Are you gay?” In that case, I’d say no. But even then I wouldn’t go on about being straight. I didn’t want to lie; I just wanted to not be the guy whose main attribute was liking other guys. Been there, done that. So anything less than a full-on, direct question would receive a deflection of some kind.

If people assumed I were straight — they call that heterosexism, I’d learned in my Speaking Out training — I’d let them. I wouldn’t go on and on about it, but I’d let them.

If someone asked if I had a girlfriend, the answer was no.

If someone asked if there were some girl I liked, or if they tried to set me up with some girl at a party, the answer was “I’m focusing on getting into a good school.” That way, I wouldn’t have to pretend to be interested, but also I wouldn’t be saying no, which would obviously make people wonder.

If something came up about someone else being gay, I’d go for Liberal Boulderite.
That’s cool
, I’d say, totally unconcerned.

I’d say as little as possible about sex and focus on other stuff.

I’d even thought about what I’d do if another gay kid told me he was gay, so I was ready for this. I was ready for anything.

“I had gay friends in Boulder. I’m definitely cool with that,” I heard myself say to Toby, and held back a grimace. How many times had people said that kind of thing to me? Like I’d be so grateful to know they liked other gay people.
Gee, how awesome of you
, I’d always thought when people said shit like that.

He smiled. “Good. Although I have to say,” he said, and suddenly he got a little coquettish, his eyes batting a touch. “I was hoping maybe you were, you know.”

I blushed. My “don’t ask, I won’t tell” plan didn’t have a contingency for a follow-up question. I tried for another deflection. “Must be tough to be gay here,” I said, averting my eyes.

Toby just stared at me. He wasn’t buying my deflections. This was not good. Not good at all.

Oh, well. So much for no lying. “Yeah. Sorry. I’m not.”

He sighed dramatically. “All the cute ones are straight or married,” he said, looking away. I laughed, though I’m not sure if and when my blushing ever really stopped.

Albie neighed and threw his head back as he returned to the room. When he sensed the awkwardness, he turned to Toby. “So you told him?”

“Ya,” Toby said.

“Your team, or my team?”

“Yours,” Toby said, mock dejectedly.

“Oh, well. Sorry, little buddy. Someday your prince will come. C-O-M-E, I mean, because I’m not about the sex innuendo. That’s the lowest form of comedy.” Then Albie appraised my mood. “You are not extremely uncomfortable.”

“I am not,” I responded.

“I thought maybe you would be.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

Albie seemed to digest this. Then he got mock serious, sticking his hand out at me and lowering his voice. “Welcome to the squad, young man. Good to have you, good to have you.”

“Um, thank you. Thank you very much,” I said, mimicking his lowered voice. And then we all laughed, and I wondered if these guys might actually be great friends to have.

In the comfort of our room, anyway.