Gay Love and Other Fairy Tales Read online

  Part of me is relieved. Part of me is devastated.

  Jordan looks back at me and there’s an uncomfortable grimace on his face. I know he doesn’t like most of the football team and some of the cheer team can be bitchy to him. I look again at the group as they near us — Nikki is one of them, Jordan’s arch-nemesis. I’ve seen her berate him at cheer practice and how he just takes it. I sometimes want to step in and tell Nikki to cool it, but it’s difficult when she’s my pretend girlfriend.

  “I better go,” Jordan says. Before I can protest, he’s up on his feet, backpack slung over his shoulder. He looks down at me before heading off. “Offer’s always open if you want to talk.” He smiles and my heart swells. Then he walks away.

  Moments later, the group of football players and cheerleaders reaches me. The people that are my “friends”. The people who don’t treat me as nice as Jordan does.

  “Why were you hanging out with him?” Nikki asks as the group circles around me.

  “None of your business,” I say with a little more force than I intend. Before they have a chance to react or to imply something about me and Jordan, I hop to my feet and pick up my bag. “What’re you guys up to?”

  Nikki steps close and runs her finger down my chest, ending somewhere near my belly button. “We’re headed to a party,” she says. “Anthony’s parents are out of town and he’s invited a bunch of people over.” Anthony is the youngest player on the team—he probably sees this party as an opportunity to build up some social cred. “You should … come,” Nikki says, really drawing that out.

  She wants to get me in some dark corner and get her hands in my pants — she’s made that clear enough over the past year or so. I’m not stupid. She doesn’t want me for me, she wants me for the status of dating the captain of the football team. Insta-perfect, as she might call it. Besides, even if she did genuinely want me for me, well, she’s missing certain body parts I’m looking for in lovers.

  But, of course, playing along with it, even just a little, helps keep those at bay who might question me. After all, who wouldn’t want to get with Nikki? Like, among straight guys. I took her to a dance last year and after all the pics for social media were done, she was really a bore, and then on the car ride home she made me pull over in a quiet park so that we could make out. We fooled around a little bit, but I wasn’t able to, uh, rise to the occasion. I didn’t want her to spread rumors about me, so I faked a stomachache and I drove her home.

  The next day, she was blabbing to everyone about how we had a hot and heavy make out session in Tillman Park. She didn’t say we had sex, but she certainly implied it. All the guys on the team were slapping my back and congratulating me. What could I say? No, we didn’t do it. I prefer guys. Nikki is missing the necessary dick.

  Social suicide. That’s what that would be.

  So I played along. And since Nikki doesn’t want to be known as the slut, she told people we were on-again-off-again boyfriend and girlfriend — that would allow her to explain away why we’re not affectionate at school (“Ben’s being a dick! I’m so over him!”) but then it gives her the chance to make up a hot story whenever she needs attention (“Ben begged me to come over last night!”). I don’t think she knows how much I’m aware of her stories, but it always reaches back to me because the whole school talks about it — which is undoubtedly her plan all along.

  Nikki pokes me in the middle of my chest, reminding me of my predicament. “What do you say?”

  “I don’t know.” I really don’t want to go to a party. I glance past all of them and I see Jordan turn a corner and finally disappear from sight.

  “Benny,” Nikki begs, low and seductive. I hate that name — Benny. “It’ll be fun. We haven’t had a chance to unwind yet this school year.”

  Behind her, I see Devon elbow a couple of guys in the ribs. They think I’m getting laid tonight. If only they knew all of the lies in front of them.

  I sigh. “Fine.”

  She squeals and I try not to wince from the assault on my ears. She grabs my hand and leads the way to her car, the rest of the gang in tow behind us, heading to their vehicles. Devon, my best bud on the team, comes up on my other side and throws an arm around my shoulders. He gives me a little shake, a silent congratulations for hopefully getting lucky with Nikki. He cares for me a lot, I know, but I wonder if he’d be the same if he knew the truth.

  I really don’t want to go to this party. But I know that if I don’t want people to know I’m — well, that — then I need to make sure they know I’m straight. Sometimes I feel so trapped by all this, like I’m living someone else’s life.

  Chapter Three

  Jordan

  It’s been a few weeks since I sat with Benjamin in the middle of the football field and he’s been avoiding me like the plague ever since. I still can’t get that moment out of my mind — his voice, his face, his posture, the tension … those damn fine biceps, the way he pouted his lips for a moment, making them look soft and kissable. I have to mentally shake my head to get the image out of it. Focus, Jordan. Benjamin was about to unload a bombshell on me. I’m sure of it.

  But what was it?

  I tried to run through all of the obvious ones first.

  Gay? No. Even if half of the rumors about him and Nikki were untrue, there was enough there to convince me that not only was he with her, he was dangerously in love. There were enough pics on her Instagram to make that clear enough.

  Drug addict? No. He’s clean as a whistle. I’ve smoked pot a couple times, but I doubt he has. With two lawyers for parents, he’s had the law hammered into him as something to obey or suffer the consequences.

  Parents are breaking up? I’ve not seen or heard anything coming from the Cooper household that would indicate there was anger or unhappiness there. Other than Ben and his brothers roughhousing and it sometimes getting out of hand, they seem like a close-knit and loving family.

  “Earth to Jordan,” Hannah said, snapping her fingers, breaking through the flurry of thoughts in my mind.

  “Sorry, Han,” I mutter, then focus back on her. We’re spending our mid-morning spare at school in our usual spot, the picnic table under the tree at the far corner of the school’s lot. Almost no one hangs out at this table, which makes it our favorite place, even if it was a little cold for mid November. I can see my breath. Yeah, it’s too cold.

  “When did you tune out?” she asks. This is her thing. She knows I can sometimes drift off in my head and she accepts that, so she wants to know the last thing I remember her saying so she can continue from that spot.

  “Some new kid?” I say.

  “Yes! Kumail!” she says, sounding excited. I raise my eyebrow at her and she just sticks out her tongue. “He just moved here from somewhere in Kansas. Senior like us. Except he’s deaf.”

  “Oh?” Even though I have no knowledge of where this story went the first time I supposedly heard it, I could make a few intuitive leaps. Hannah’s younger sister is deaf too and so she’s fluent in sign.

  “He has an EA with him that translates everything, but Principal Moyer wants to jump-start his social life at school. He didn’t say that directly, obviously, but I know that’s what he was thinking. He pulled me out of first period to introduce me to Kumail.” Seriously, when Hannah has a story to tell, her mouth can go a mile a minute. But I like it. I also like this other part of her, the part that wants to help those of us who are lesser in society. Like the gays and the deaf kids. She’s verbally ripped a few people to shreds on my behalf before. “I invited him to join us for lunch,” she says. I realize I’ve tuned out a bit again, but this time I’ve at least tuned back in with enough context that I don’t have to ask her to repeat anything.

  “Oh yeah?” I say.

  “Yeah, you’ll like him, I hope.” I try not to read into that. Hannah has tried to set me up with a couple guys since I came out, but her gaydar is pitiful. Every guy she wants me to date is woefully straight. There are only a few gay kids here at
Charlesburgh High that I’m aware of — and a few that I suspect will come out sooner or later — but all the guys Hannah has her eyes on for me don’t even register on my gaydar as even a little bit gay.

  Maybe she just means I’ll like him as a friend. I hope that’s all she’s implying. Maybe she just wants this Kumail kid to have as many friends as possible. Not a lot of people know sign after all.

  I know a little bit of sign. Hannah took it upon herself to teach me basic vocabulary over the years so that when I visit her house I can at least say hi to her sister. I’ve picked up a bit more than that over the years — not enough for a full conversation, but enough to hold my own.

  The end of our spare is marked by a harsh buzzer cutting through the air. I groan and stand up, slinging my backpack over my shoulder. Hannah is a little less dramatic than me.

  We head into school and part ways, her heading to English and me heading to math.

  Benjamin is in math with me. It’s been awkward. He ignores me, like looking at me is painful. I wonder again what he was planning to tell me. Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been too important or else he would have told me in the weeks since that night.

  Crap. That night. I saw the party he went to on Snapchat. Nikki was all over him. Even from the safety and security of my bedroom, far removed from the party, I felt cringey for all the partiers who had to watch those two tongue-wrestle all night. I hope they at least found a bedroom to take it private.

  When I enter the classroom, my eyes immediately find Ben’s and then he looks away. A slight red tinge warms his cheeks. What’s that about?

  I take my seat, which, to make things even more awkward, is right behind him. See, at the start of the school year, we were talking to each other — even though we barely had anything resembling a friendship and the “talking to each other” was little more than the occasional hello — and with Ms. Barnes being a stickler for her seating plan, I was stuck behind Ben even when it seemed like he wished I wasn’t even in the room.

  “Hey,” I mutter as I pass by. I always do that. Force of habit. Part of me hopes that one day he’ll say “hey” back and we’ll suddenly be back on speaking terms.

  Seriously, I don’t know what I did wrong to earn this silence. Even when I came out he didn’t give me this much silence. Our low-key friendship changed, but not by much, and the silence he’d imposed then had only lasted a couple days before he started talking to me again and telling me some crazy story about his brothers.

  As I sit down, I just barely hear him say, “Hey, Jordan.”

  I freeze when I hear his voice, half sitting in my chair, half still standing. Part of me wondered if I’d ever hear it again. And part of me wondered if I’d just imagined that whole thing. Then he glances half over his shoulder, to where I can just barely see the corner of his eye, and a gentle smile stretches his lips.

  I decide to push my luck. “How you doing?”

  He makes a noise that sounds like the middle ground between a grunt and the word “fine”. Then he turns again so he fully faces the front. Well. That’s good. I think.

  I stare at his back as Ms. Barnes starts up her lesson. I write down whatever she writes on the whiteboard, but, seriously, it’s in one ear and out the other right now. I hope the next thing Benjamin says to me is an explanation for the past few weeks. And then the second thing he says better be an apology.

  • • •

  We decide that the day is just too cold to go and eat our lunch outside. The spare period was enough November weather for me. Hannah and I grab a table at the edge of the cafeteria, hopefully making it easier for Kumail to find us when he comes looking.

  “Benjamin talked to me today,” I tell her. I told her a little bit about what happened on the football field. I didn’t tell her that I thought he was going to tell me some big secret — if he’s having trouble telling me, his friend of more than a decade, that he even has a secret, he certainly doesn’t want me blabbing about it to everyone I meet. But I did tell her that he seemed depressed and that something was bothering him. And then I told her about the silence.

  Every week she’d pry and ask if I’d heard from him. When I would tell her, yet again, that the answer was no, she’d sometimes try to guess at what was going on. But I always tried to cut that off. I didn’t want to think about all the things that could be bothering Ben — though we’d drifted apart over the years, he’s still a friend and means a lot to me, and so I don’t want idle speculation on his many theoretical faults.

  She puts down her yogurt cup and leans so far forward that she’s almost crawling on the table to get to me. “What did he say?”

  “Just ‘hey’.”

  “Hey?”

  “Hey.”

  “And?”

  “And then I asked him how he’s doing. He just grunted.” I unwrap my sandwich and take a bite. “That was it,” I say with a mouth half full of sandwich.

  “Huh,” she says, picking up her yogurt cup again and scooping some out. She puts it in her mouth and swallows it down. “It’s a start, I guess.”

  She doesn’t really know Ben, certainly not like I know Ben. When Benjamin and I went our separate ways a few years ago and I found myself as a freshman member of the cheer team, I met Hannah. We were both awkward and out of place and so we bonded pretty quickly. I wasn’t out at that time, but I think she sensed that something was different about me, which played into her need to bond with the outsiders and outcasts.

  A few moments later, we’re interrupted by a tall and skinny kid with a lunch tray. I’ve never seen this guy before but it doesn’t take a leap to assume this is Kumail. He looks at Hannah with a big smile, then Hannah signs to him. Yup, Kumail.

  Have a seat, she signs.

  He nods, then sits next to her.

  I stumble through my words. Hi. My name is Jordan.

  His already-big smile broadens even more when he realizes I can sign too. He introduces himself, spelling out his name with individual letters. Hannah then launches into a conversation with him that I can only partly follow—their hands are moving far too fast for me. But I think she’s asking him how his first day is going. Judging by the exuberance in his hand motions and the smile on his face, it’s going well so far.

  I guess because I’m not able to follow the conversation, I find my mind drifting as I continue eating my lunch. With Thanksgiving around the corner, we have our final performance for the cheer team and the final game for football—Charlesburgh puts on an exhibition game with Kelvin, our arch-rival school. Once that’s over, then I’m free from the tyranny of Nikki, at least as far as the cheer team goes. I’ve still got the rest of the school year with her and we share a few classes. Plus, it’s hard to not be annoyed by her at any major school event, what with the endless posing for photos.

  “We’ll make sure it happens!” Hannah says out loud. I look to her and find her looking at me.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Were we going too fast?” she asks me, signing for the benefit of Kumail.

  “A little,” I say, also signing.

  “I was telling Kumail about prom and he said he doesn’t go to school events because they’re never deaf-friendly.” She looks at Kumail and he nods, following her words via her hands. “So I said we’d make sure it happens, that prom is deaf-friendly.”

  I smile so broad that I feel like my face is going to crack. That’s classic Hannah — and that’s why I love her. She finds out that one person feels left out because of who they are, and she takes it upon herself to change the world so that person fits in.

  “So you’re going to join the prom committee?” I ask. I stumbled with my signing. How do I sign “committee” again? I end up just spelling it for Kumail. If he’s going to have lunch with us on the reg, then I really need to brush up on my sign. I can’t spell everything — conversations would take forever.

  “I saw something about it on the notification board. I think it starts up next week,” she says. r />
  I’d seen the poster too. I tried not to sneer at it. Prom is such a hetero thing. Prom king, prom queen, happy hetero couples dancing to sappy music. I’ll go, yeah, but not with a date. And I won’t dance. Except with Hannah — if she wants to dance with me, I’ll begrudgingly oblige.

  “Sounds fun,” I say, sarcasm heavy in my voice. I overemphasize my facial expression for Kumail’s benefit. I don’t know how to sign sarcasm. Can someone sign sarcasm?

  “It will be fun,” she says. She then bursts into another flurry of sign with Kumail and I’m lost again.

  Maybe prom will be better than I expect with Hannah involved in planning. Not only would she make sure it’s deaf-friendly, given her friendship with me she’d make sure it’s homo-friendly too.

  I pull a sachet of fruit snacks out of my lunch bag — a holdover from elementary school that I’m still not ready to give up on — and open it up. Quickly dividing them by color, I gobble down my least-favorite flavors first, then move on to the better-tasting ones. All while watching Hannah and Kumail.

  I can’t make out what they’re saying, except for a word or phrase here or there, but I’m not really paying attention to the content of their conversation. Instead, I’m focusing more on body language. Particularly Kumail’s body language.

  I hope Hannah has no plans on setting me up with him because, cute as he is, I’m pretty sure he’s straight. And he’s attracted to Hannah. It’s pretty obvious. But I can’t tell if she’s into him. She likes him, yeah, but does she like him enough to match what I’m pretty sure I’m seeing from him? That I don’t know.