Talker

D e dica tion

ALL of my work, whether I remember the dedication or not, is somehow dedicated to my husband. “Mate” and I have been together since we were nineteen years old.

We were the ones with the restaurant jobs, taking classes, while living in the shitty apartment. We were the ones with the poor-man’s C hristmas tree, and we were the ones who had to choose between heat and light. (We chose light and were grateful for the big camping sleeping bags my parents gave us for C hristmas. They were later stolen, because hey—did I mention it was a shitty apartment?)

I write a lot of stories about young love and first-time lovers, and I do it with optimism that the lovers wil make it, because Mate and I did. So when you get to the end, don’t worry about Brian and Talker. Have a little faith. Turns out that sometimes, faith and a sense of humor real y can be al you need. (And a chance to raid your parents’ garden or eat free restaurant food. That helps too.) Talker |
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P a rt I

I Will F ollow

Then

Brian C ooper was on the big tour bus, on the way to his first track meet, when he first met Tate Walker. He was sitting by himself, because he didn’t know anybody, and he felt like the only person on earth without an iPod or a cel phone that folded itself into origami and took a dump for you to boot. Tate came on late, and brother, was he a sight.

Half his face was taken up with a glorious tribal tattoo, one that extended down to the neck of his long-sleeved shirt and over his half-gloved hand. Later, Tate would get an entire sleeve tattoo there and stop wearing long-sleeved shirts, but the tattoo was not even the most amazing part of his look.

His right ear, the side with the tattoo, was pierced upward of a dozen times, and so was his nose, and his eyebrow, and his lip (although that one was the first to go). His inky dark hair was cut into a Mohawk, and the tattoo extended over half his scalp as wel .

Although the Mohawk was back in a ponytail for the meet, Brian had seen Tate around school, and very often he wore it in four-inch spikes, courtesy of E lmer’s glue and a lot of grooming, Brian assumed.

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So he was scary-looking, and Brian was not oblivious to the fact that the kids on the bus talked shit about him—but Brian didn’t care. Because today, Tate eyed the spot next to Brian and smiled tentatively before he sat down. He had his earbud in one ear and was halfway dancing to the song playing for him and him alone. He tended to jerk sometimes, when he wasn’t out on the track—just twitch right out of his skin, it looked like—but he was looking at Brian like Brian wasn’t a freak, and for the first time since he’d started school the month before, something frozen in Brian melted.

O h, thank G od, Brian wasn’t alone on the goddamned bus.

He was sitting on the left side of the bus, so he didn’t get to see Tate’s tattoo, and he had to admit, he was curious. It didn’t matter—someone was sitting next to him, someone was talking to him… and brother, was that kid talking.

“Hey—hope you don’t mind if I sit. I know, the other kids talk about me being gay and shit.” (They did—they weren’t nice about it, either.) “But I swear that’s not catching or anything. Here—I’m listening to this band cal ed The Doves—you want to listen?

“Kingdom of Rust” is such an awesome song—sad, but you know, awesome. But if you’re not in the mood for sad, I’ve got something really rocking—rocking helps for pumping you up for a meet.

Although, I don’t know….” He hesitated. “You tend to do a lot of throwing. Do you need to Zen out or do you need to get al pumped?”

He final y stopped and looked at Brian as though he expected an answer. Brian blinked and tried to come up with one. “I don’t know music,” he said, embarrassed. “But I’d love to listen to whatever you’ve got.”

The kid with the tattoo and Mohawk had grinned then, his smile shining and pure (and a little crowded—not a lot of dental work here), and handed Brian his earbud.

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“I’ve seen you throw, right? And you can run too. No wonder you got a scholarship!”

Brian flushed. “I had to sort of audition,” he mumbled. “I was homeschooled—it was the only way I could get into college.” His shoulder was already giving him twinges. He’d started thinking about how to pay for school when it gave out.

Tate nodded as though this happened every day. “See, I used to be a skater, right? But the second, third, sixth time I broke my wrist, one of the coaches at my school threw me on the track in my running shoes and told me to keep my feet on the ground. He helped get me my scholarship, so we’re, like, you know, the same.”

Brian looked at that vulnerable expression, a sort of “please, please let us be the same” expression, and wondered that someone who would ink the side of his face and shave his head and wear pipe-cleaning, hip-dropping skinny jeans and sparkly sequined T-shirts would need to be “the same” as anyone. But that was only because he’d just met Tate, and was sitting on his left side.

But the boy seemed to be waiting for an answer, and Brian dredged up the only one he could think of.

“You broke your wrist six times?”

Now

TATE was lacing up his running shoes when he told Brian about his new hobby.

Brian thought very seriously about throwing up. He changed his mind and thought about throwing his fist through the wal . But Tate kept talking, as blind as bacterium to Brian’s complete emotional supernova, and by the time he was done, his innocent Talker |
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question about why Brian looked like he’d swalowed a poisoned rat elicited a three-word answer that had Tate cringing.

F uck you, asshole.

It rang between them for a stunned moment, and Tate let the façade of “tough-tat-boy” drop. “What’s wrong?” he asked, genuinely hurt. It was hard to see hurt on his face. F or one thing, the tattoo tended to mask his emotions, which Brian was pretty sure was what Tate had intended in the first place. It was also difficult to see Tate hurt—so much about Tate was like a crumpled bal of brittle cel ophane, transparent and broken.

Brian had learned not to see the tattoos anymore, or the piercings or the hair, and he’d learned to real y love the way Tate always bounced on his toes or twitched, even when he was standing stil .

That was Tate—always hearing fantastic strains of alien music and succumbing to the urge to dance.

So even though looking at Tate was an exercise in misdirection—the carefully designed hair, body (he’d final y had his sleeve tattoo done), clothes, face—all of it was made to attract attention, to draw it away from the things he didn’t want people to see. Brian had made a study of looking beyond that.

Which was why this new “hobby” scared the shit out of him.

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P a rt II

Appearance Lies

THEY were in their second year of track before they got to be really good friends. That was mostly Brian’s fault—he’d been orphaned young and raised by his aunt in the hil s, and had difficulty reading social cues, so he hadn’t known how to take Tate’s tentatively extended hand in friendship and run with it.

It didn’t help that Tate kept expecting him to be as mean-spirited as the rest of the guys on the track team. Brian ignored those guys—he didn’t like mean people, he was starting to real y like Tate’s music, and he enjoyed track meets for the bus rides only, and that was because of Tate.

Besides, they had to test early and often for drugs, so whatever made Tate move like that had to be something in his own head.

And Tate (or Talker, as the guys cal ed him sometimes) kept sitting next to Brian on the bus or lingering near him to talk during practice, and that was good. The track team alone was bigger than Brian’s homeschool cadre, grades K-12.

After that first meeting, he real y looked forward to those bus rides with that twitching, chatting person who seemed to seek out his attention. He certainly wasn’t going to turn down that offer of companionship because Talker was openly gay. Not even after a Talker |
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girl in his English class with big, dark eyes started chatting him up and blew him into having a girlfriend.

Talker was different than the other kids on the team, the ones who expected Brian to contribute something witty or sarcastic.

Talker would talk about movies or music or Web sites for hours, without pause, without even waiting for an answer or to see if Brian was listening.

Brian was always listening. He learned more about pop culture and living with masses of his fel ow human beings on those bus rides than he could ever fully relay to Tate Walker. Tate, however, was always very grateful at the end of the ride.

“Man, thanks for putting up with my mental diarrhea. You’re, like, best listener ever. Next time, I’l bring you an extra set of buds, and we can hear Placebo in stereo, right?”

Tate always kept his promises, and Placebo became one of Brian’s favorite bands.

So Brian had known Talker for about a year and a half when he suddenly got a glimpse into who Tate Walker real y was. It was like a window into a whole other world.

Brian had lingered after practice that day. It was becoming painfully obvious that his shoulder would definitely not last for even three years, and he wanted to baby it for as long as possible to keep his scholarship. He’d listened to the other kids talking about jobs and decided he’d be up to his elbows in a restaurant job soon enough when track was gone, so he might as well stay as healthy as possible for as long as he could.

So there he was in his tighty-whities and a plain gray T-shirt, icing his shoulder, when he heard Talker bawling to Dropkick Murphys at the top of his lungs—and doing a passable job of it, since the band tended toward Irish rap and they sang fast! Tate Talker |
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must have thought he was completely alone, because as he rounded the corner, toweling his long stripe of hair with one hand and holding a towel wrapped around his waist with another, he was still singing—but he stopped abruptly and fel on his ass when he saw Brian there, stinking of Ben-G ay and rotating his shoulder gingerly.

Brian regarded Tate with quiet surprise, and then he saw the scars.

Talker hadn’t gotten the sleeve tattoo done yet, and Brian had long since stopped trying to look at his face tattoo like a gawker at a zoo. He knew that Tate wore long-sleeved shirts year round, in spite of the hundred-plus degree heat in Sacramento in the summer, or the fact that summer often stretched until O ctober. He even knew that the coach let Tate wear long-sleeved track-shirts, when the rest of the world was in a tank top. After a year and half of acquaintanceship, now Brian knew why.

The original tattoo ended at the edge of his neck, and the scar—a mottled combination of old burn scars and skin grafts, extended down the entire right side of his body. Suddenly the random, original tattoo pattern made sense: tattooing over scar tissue was difficult and painful. The artist had simply followed the tissue pattern for the best effect. And since colors would bleed, the stark black made sense too. The entire tattoo was camouflage, hiding Tate’s scars in plain sight.

The reason Tate was always the last one off the track and never showered with the rest of the team was obvious as wel .

The look in Tate’s brown eyes was… heartbreaking. He scowled at Brian as he picked himself up with dignity, and an echoing silence fel over the two of them as Tate dared Brian to say something.

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Brian wanted to say a lot. He wanted to say, “O h, I get it now,”

because so much about Tate’s personality made sense. He also wanted to say, “Look, I don’t care about the scars—I’m not going to make fun of them, you don’t have to worry about me. I’m a good guy.” He really wanted to say “Holy shit, what happened!” but even he knew that was not good form.

What he did say was, “O uch,” and he said it mildly, without a lot of drama. Brian never did real y go for drama—he’d been quiet and self-contained, even as a child.