I get myself cleaned up enough that my skin isn’t crawling, but I have no idea where to go from here. A door slamming outside makes me startle and drop the wad of damp paper towels. I swipe at them but miss, leaning on my knees and trying to get a deep breath. Fuck. Every good feeling rushes out of me. The weight on my chest is back and it doesn’t leave room for anything so warm or delicate as the things Rafe makes me feel.
“I didn’t say that about Javi to make you feel sorry for me,” Rafe says. He’s regarding me uncertainly in the mirror when I stand up.
“I don’t feel sorry for you, man. I mean, of course I’m sorry you lost your friend. But you’ve got a job you love, lots of friends, shit to care about, your family. Those kids worship you.” I shake my head. “From where I’m standing, you’ve got everything.”
He drops his hands from my shoulders and looks at the tile floor.
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. I’m lucky. Luckier than I have any right to be.”
Chapter 7
SINCE MONDAY, Rafe and I have talked a lot, and it’s been easy. He doesn’t pretend that he’s into the same things as me. He doesn’t like horror movies, doesn’t know anything about cars, and doesn’t follow sports except for the World Cup and the occasional hockey game. He did give me shit when he found out I played football in high school, though. Said he was surprised I turned into a runner because didn’t most football players try their damnedest not to run more than a few yards at a time. So I guess he does have a sense of humor.
Well. Not really. And he doesn’t want me to entertain him the way I would with someone in a bar. In fact, when I try to joke around to fill the silence or make light of something, he doesn’t seem amused. He’s not rude or anything. He just takes things seriously, I guess.
It’s a strange feeling. I’ve spent so many years shooting the shit that I kind of forgot that I had things to say.
I’ve been remembering it lately, though. Remembering people I used to talk to. There was this kid I knew in seventh and eighth grade. Charlie Lancaster. He was kind of strange, always talking about morbid stuff like death and skeletons and plagues. But I liked listening to him. I liked how he didn’t care that people thought he was weird. And after Mom died, all the things he was talking about kind of made sense to me.
His parents had been killed in a car crash when he was ten, and he managed to sit with me and talk and not spout a bunch of shit about how sorry he was for me. Useless comments that made me want to scream and punch people right in their weepy, sympathetic mouths. But Charlie and I talked about what it meant for someone to suddenly cease to exist. About the space someone can leave behind. About where you go after you die—we never agreed on that one: he thought you just disappeared as if you’d never existed, lingering only in the memories of the ones who knew you; I thought there had to be… something. Now, though, I think Charlie might’ve been right.
But the thing I haven’t thought about since freshman year, when I joined football and started hanging out with Xavier and the other guys on the team instead of Charlie, is how I felt when I was near him. How we’d sit, side by side, against the half wall separating the school from the service entrance off the street when it was warm, or against the lockers in the southeast corner of the third floor in winter, talking. How sometimes our shoulders would press together and neither of us would move away. How I was aware that Charlie always smelled like clean laundry, mint, and sweat. How I’d look forward to lunch because it meant seeing Charlie and hearing about whatever he’d been thinking about lately.
And how, sometimes, on really bad days after Mom died, I’d feel a strange compulsion to let my head drop down on Charlie’s shoulder, like maybe touching him could leach off some of the poison I felt snaking through my veins.
After Rafe and I, um… well, after Monday, I expected to feel some kind of seismic shift. But it didn’t happen. If anything, it’s more as if a mess that seemed really jumbled has shaken out into a pattern I can recognize.
“Hey,” I say to Rafe, ignoring the terrible movie we’ve been not really watching. “Did you—when did you realize you were…?”
“Gay? When I was ten or eleven, there was this group of guys in my neighborhood. They were—” He shakes his head. “—trouble. But there was something about them that appealed to me. The way they carried themselves. Their style. They looked tough. Like they could look out for themselves. They were probably only fourteen or fifteen, but I thought of them as being grown. I wanted to be like them. Look like them, dress like them, have a group of people to watch my back like them.