The Hurt Patrol (8 page)

“We'll pitch the tents before it gets dark, Scouts, so hurry.” Scoutie Jeff was uncharacteristically terse. “We need to dig a latrine too, and we have to make up for lost time, so let's focus!”

They were almost two hours late, due to an unanticipated occurrence of unhappy happenstance. The bus had gotten not one, but
two
flats, both on the same side, going over some unseen jagged metal whatnot somewhere on the shoulder of the road. After that uproar was over, they were on the road, again, but two hours late. Hence the grimness. Hence the hurry.

So they scurried to do the stuff, getting everything pitched and sorted and thrown into appropriate piles. In an impressive amount of time, for them anyway, the latrine was dug and the campfire started, very quickly and in total darkness. Pretty good.

Dinner was delicious because they were starved from all the intensity. Then, later, after the assorted campfire songs and stories were sung and told, after the scoutmasters had retired to their distant tents, later still when the farts, both real and handmade, had subsided, the exhausted Hurt Patrol fell asleep in their camping bags. And as they slept their warm and weary Boy Scout breath began to heat the snow beneath them, but they were sound asleep and didn't notice. That is, until the previously unnoticed tear in the tent floor became obvious, as the bottom of the tent started to become soaked in icy cold wetness.

“OMG! It's
WET!
” It was Hunter, the weirdest one, howling in the dark. Everyone was jolted awake, which is how Hunter came to be with them in the first place. For a minute, they thought he'd just peed in his sleeping bag again, but then they felt it too.

“OMG! We sprung a LEAK!” Rob screamed. He shot upright to a standing position, still in his bag, and started hopping around like a giant panicked chrysalis. Everyone tried to scoot away and stay dry, but it was too dark, and they fell over each other trying to get out of the wet. Half of the tent was already sopped.

“What a mess!
Jesus!
Okay, listen UP!” It was Pete, taking control. “We have to squeeze to the far end and everyone has to smash together where it's still dry. Okay? So just do it and don't be weird.”

They ended up smashed together up at the high end of the tent, though they hadn't noticed any slope in the ground when they pitched it. This ended up actually being much better. They were warmer immediately due to their shared body heat. It had been so cold, it was hard to get to sleep, but now they could finally rest.

Beau had ended up crushed in the middle, spooning Rob, with Pete spooning him, but they were too tired to laugh. As they dropped off to sleep again, Beau felt Pete slump and start to snore gently. Pete snored whistley, like a cartoon. Beau felt himself drowsing off. At one point he started awake briefly in the unfamiliar surroundings, and as he came back to himself, he realized the weight across his back was not the sleeping bag. It was Pete, sound asleep, who had thrown his arm across Beau for warmth. In fact, he was hugging him, and as Beau comprehended the situation, he froze—and not from the cold.

And just like that it dawned on Beau that his school chums were accurate. He
was
gay. Beau
did
want to wake up with a guy's arm thrown across him, forever.

Beau was gay. It had never been clear before. Not like this.

Motionlessly, he watched the sky lighten through the patch of plastic tent window as Pete snort/whistled softly. Slowly, the cloud cover turned gray, then molten red gold, and then white.

Beau had always known something was different with him, but in spite of everything, he had never been sure it was because he was gay. He just thought he felt different from other guys because he was intelligent. But now he knew. It was true. He
was
smart....

. . .
And
gay.

He didn't want to wake Pete up, because then he'd pull his arm back, so Beau silently reveled in the moment, exhaling deeply to keep his breathing measured. Because as he realized his truth, he also cried.

Revelations can do that.

“Omg, Beau,” I say, and then stop talking because I don't know what I was planning on saying next.

“I know.” He nods. “Imagine how weird that was, for me, after that. At that point, I decided the only thing I could do was never let them find out.”

“You decided not to tell them you were gay? Why, if they were your friends?”

“Because! I was worried. They were too important to me. If I lost Pete and Jewels, or those other guys in the Hurt Patrol, I would be lost. I'd be hosed! They were the only reason the other guys at school backed off.”

“Yeah . . . I can see that. How is this a good memory, though?”

“Don't you get it? I discovered that I was just gay! Before that, I didn't know if I was like a psychopath or something, like a freak of nature or whatever, and now I saw I was just gay . . . no big deal! I was so relieved! I thought I was mentally ill because everyone else was talking about touching boobs ALL the time, and I sooooo couldn't care less . . . seriously! I thought I was insane.” He shakes his head, remembering.

Just the way he says it makes me smile. He looks over sharply and is reassured by the recognition in my face. We shrug. It's awesome to realize that you are just one of many, having a very normal crisis, and not some terrible mutant who should go live in a bat cave.

“So, yeah, after that, I weirdly felt better about myself, but also worse about the next stage, because I knew, sooner or later, I was either going to have to figure out to how to be straight or come out.”

The patrols returned from snow camping, and now Beau knew his own secret. And that was huge. It was good to know his classmates were correct in their assessment. He
was
a “big ol' queer”
and
a “homo”
and
a “gaylord”! It evoked a weirdly inexplicable sense of relief. Because now Beau felt he could work on fixing it and becoming the real boy his dad always wanted. And if his dad could calm down, maybe his mom would too, and they could patch things up, and everything could finally get good.

All Beau had to do was like girls. His dad had been right all along:
girls!
Problem solved. Beau daydreamed incessantly. All he had to do was figure out a way to feel straight now.

So he resolutely started holding Jewels's hand in the halls, between classes, and before school. Pete would wander the halls with them frequently, like a bigger shark in shark-infested waters. It helped remind the more snarky of the sharks who Beau's friends were.

When he wasn't guarding freshmen, Pete hung out with his friends from the upper classes. He was popular with classmates and teachers both, though male teachers were always on the receiving end of his smartassery. He was unfailingly sweet to the female teachers, however. He said they had enough crap to deal with, so he'd give 'em a pass. He always had a crush on his grade-school teachers, Jewels said, till like sixth grade. Pete just really liked women. Like, liked them . . . like, left to his own devices, he'd totally prefer their company. And they realized that about him from a very young age and responded in kind.

Thus, Pete had millions of candidates for a girlfriend. But Pete did not vary. He remained steadfast to Bonnie, his love. When he wasn't walking the halls with Beau, he would sit in the inside courtyard with her, sometimes holding hands but always nattering intently, both engrossed in the other. They could be seen outside in good weather, wandering together to the school benches, and then sitting, sometimes kissing, enthralled in each other. Beau noticed that when they sat, they were much closer to the same height.

Bonnie was unusual. She had been born with a strange twist in her genes, in that her fingers and legs were very short; though most everything else about her was nearly normal sized and unremarkable. But her legs were defying her. They had just stopped growing, though the rest of her developed more normally. She was the same height she had been in fourth grade, approximately.

But she wasn't having it. She wasn't going to just accept her fate. Nor was her family. When she got her full growth, they were going to start making her be taller. By way of a gigantic operation.

Pete explained they were going to break her legs in two places—

“BREAK?! Break her LEGS?! OMG!!!” I shout, before I remember to be quiet.

Leonie, sprawled sleeping in the backseat, opens her eyes and murmurs, then closes them again.

“Shhhh—be quiet,” Beau whispers.

“Sorry . . . BREAK?!” I repeat, this time a hiss of dismay. “
Break
her legs!
Both legs?
How awful!”

“Well, that's how I felt too, but Pete was all, ‘No, it's better this way. She will live an easier life. She will fit into society, ' ” Beau replies. “So I'm all, omg, is this to save her life, or could she just
not?
”

I get such a deep feeling in my heart, of sadness.... That feeling that you'd do
anything
—no matter how painful, just to be accepted and thus more comfortable in your own mind.

Beau sees my mournful expression. He touches my arm, briefly. “I know, right? I'm like, really? You'd go to such extremes, just to get along? But Pete goes, ‘no—she really wants to! She's stoked! Like, to be tall!' So, I figured I just met her and I didn't know what I'm talking about, so they were probably right. It was such a gross, horrible, mental idea; it
must
work, right?”

So, the plan: The doctors break her legs, and that would make her bones get longer. It would take many months to heal, and years of physical therapy afterward, but slowly and surely she would become more normal sized, to help her fit more comfortably into this presently too-tall world.