Every Time I Think of You (16 page)

“That was between me and her. Or, she and I. You,” she plopped down a bag of raw carrots, “are grounded for leaving school and lying about it.”

As I peeled carrots into playful shapes for a new-old recipe, my mother appeared to have overcome her dressing-down from the town scion.

We never heard another word from Everett’s mother. She must have yanked his phone right out of the wall, because I didn’t hear from him, either.

Chapter 25

It was the two bong hits.

It was the new Pink Floyd album.

It was the fact that, with his parents and two brothers conveniently not home, Kevin preferred to lounge around in shorts, in freeball mode.

It was knowing Everett had basically played pimp for the two of us. His being just down the street, even if bedridden and drugged up, provided an aphrodisiac by proximity.

It was the occasional sealed letter from Everett, infrequently given to me at school by Kevin or slipped into my locker, that both wound up my sense of hope and dashed it into despair. Passing me in the hall, Kevin’s brief shake ‘No’ meant there was no note or word from him, or that Kevin hadn’t even bothered to see him.

I was horny, and I could tell someone about Everett, about my love for him, about my fears for him, even to an apparently bisexual stud whom I’d never thought considered me as anything but another guy on his track team.

But my mouth would spend less time talking, and more time doing what Kevin wanted done to him, or more specifically, what one large, blood-engorged body part wanted done.

Afterward, he had complimented me for having a great deal more expertise and enthusiasm than most of the girls he dated.

Kevin would call, and I’d walk over to his house through the woods when his family was out, at least once a weekend night. He’d hint about sex, had even shown me a porn video, a straight one. His shorts would tent as his dick thickened, or, as with his pole vaulting, peeked out one way or another. What we did, or rather, what I did to him, left me feeling like less of a sexual partner and more of a human handkerchief.

It was disappointing to discover that sex without love, no matter how much better equipped that other partner was, could still be enjoyable, but not as much, not by a long shot.

Which was why, for reasons I didn’t need to explain to Kevin, after a few weeks I declined his subsequent invitations to “hang out.”

Somewhere in the midst of all this, during a pleading phone call to Holly that I be forgiven, even though I didn’t see any need to apologize, she reminded me that any diplomatic efforts toward her mother had fallen on rather unsympathetic ears. She also explained that Everett wasn’t in any position to defy her, either.

“So, ya got caught
infragrante el delecto
,” Kevin mused as he extracted a small bag of pot from his Camaro’s glove compartment.

I refrained from correcting Kevin’s terminology. I had also refrained from sucking on anything of his other than the joints he’d rolled over the past few weeks. My own refusal, despite Kevin’s large talents, puzzled him at first. Aspiring for monogamy seemed stranger than mere homosexuality. His reaction was similar to his casual attitude during our trysts. “Whatever.”

Kevin had invited me to join him for a drive and a smoke before the graduation ceremony. I’d excused myself from my parents’ company with the ruse of a small party beforehand, not revealing that the party consisted of Kevin, myself, and his stash.

Tightening the papers with a twist, Kevin grabbed his lighter, opened his car door, and nodded for me to join him outside to sit on the hood. He’d never smoked inside his “baby,” as he called the Camaro. He’d trained me in the intricacies of discreet pot-smoking, which included always bringing breath mints and eye drops.

As we shared hits, the late morning sun glinted off his car window. He’d parked on a small back road in a rural section of town less than a mile from the school. Our graduation gowns and caps lay in plastic bags on his car’s back seat.

Cheryl was, Kevin confessed to me without much encouragement, my top competition for Most Talented in pleasing his desires for passive fellatio. I’d never met her. He’d showed me a wallet-sized yearbook portrait.

Despite our mutual closeness with Everett, I was using Kevin as much as he was using me. With him, I pretended to forget that the reason I succumbed to our casual sex was to try to forget Everett, the pain of being so close to him yet forbidden to see him.

It wasn’t an exact analogy, but since I knew every high school student had been required to read it, some image of the forlorn Dickensian woman might be familiar to Kevin.

I nodded agreement, handed him back the joint. He sucked in the last of it, and in his smoky breath-held-in voice, said, “Shotgun,” nonchalantly aimed his puckered lips at me, and exhaled. I sucked it in, held it, and for the first time, as the smoke exuded slowly through my nose, Kevin kissed me.

Reaching for the bottle of eye drops as we sat back in the car, feeling that familiar rumbling in my bowels, I added, “Besides, I gotta see a drag queen.”

After fast-walking with me to the school rest room, Kevin had said something that stuck in my mind throughout the ceremony, with all its speeches by faculty and valedictorians who hadn’t had to prove their valor by defending the good name of their crippled boyfriends.

Kevin had an idea. After getting stoned, his great ideas usually floated away with the haze of smoke. But this one stuck.

From the other side of the stall as he held my cap and gown, Kevin had said, “Ya gotta find a way to get him outta that house, man.”

“How? Kidnap him?”

“No, somethin’… somethin’ with a reason, like, one that’s far away from her.”

I should have thanked Wendell Graff. If not for our little altercation, and perhaps one-tenth percentage point more in my GPA, I would have been one of the capped and gowned students given the duty of making a speech at our graduation ceremony.

As I half-listened to amplified words about “our future,” “our achievements” and “our legacy,” as I offered a hazy smile to my parents, seated up in the bleachers of the gymnasium, to the moment later on where my entire row of alphabetically-seated fellow students rose to accept their diplomas, as those square tasseled caps were flung up in the air, before they came flopping down to the gym floor, I realized what I needed to do about my future, about Everett’s future, about our future.

Chapter 26

‘Autonomic Dysreflexia is usually caused when a painful stimulus occurs below the level of spinal cord injury. The stimulus is then mediated through the Central Nervous System (CNS) and the Peripheral Nervous System (PNS). The CNS is made up of the spinal cord and brain, which control voluntary acts and end organs via their respective nerves. The PNS is made up from 12 pairs of cranial nerves, spinal nerves and peripheral nerves. The PNS also is divided into the somatic nervous system and the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is responsible for the signs and symptoms of autonomic dysreflexia. The autonomic nervous system normally maintains body homeostasis via its two branches, the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system (PANS) and the sympathetic autonomic nervous system (SANS). These branches have complementary roles through a negative-feedback system; that is, when one branch is stimulated, the other branch is suppressed.’

Despite distance, maternal barriers and even the possibility of life-threatening make-out sessions, I dedicated myself to somehow being in Everett’s life again.

I could not sleep with him each night, or any night, perhaps, even though my every night was full of thoughts about him. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t help him.

Being raised by two parents who nurtured my sometimes obsessive studying habits, when I said, despite having just graduated from high school, that I was going to the public library, I expected and received no questions until my return.

“What were you studying?” my dad asked as I walked up the driveway. He was in the garage with the door open, toying with the wires attached to a pair of old speakers he’d bought at a garage sale. “Getting a jump on your summer job?”

“No, spinal injuries.” I extracted a thick pile of books from my backpack. I’d also taken notes from a few reference books and emptied a pocket full of nickels at the copy machine to save extensive medical charts.

Dad set a speaker down on his work table. “This is about Everett.”

“Well, yeah.”

Dad sort of sighed, as if he were rehearsing the words in his head. “I know you’re … you have feelings for your friend, and that’s fine. But, you have to consider what his family’s going through. Now, I don’t know if what his mother said was right or not–”

“That’s what I want to find out.”

“Fine. But the point is, I thought we agreed it’s pretty clear that it might be a good idea to give him some space; give it some time.”

Despite the fact that it should have been clear to any alert parent that Kevin was more of a bad influence to any boy than I was, since Everett’s accident, he had regained visiting privileges to the Forrester home. Getting the information from Everett was easy enough, and sharing it with me a few hours later only furthered my resolve.

Satisfied with the spinal cord research I’d found, I shifted to an additional topic; poring over out-of-town phone books, state maps, medical journals, financial reports and periodicals. Research was my turf, and in that area, I was a hotshot.

Driving off with my mother’s car on another half-lie was the least of my problems.

My parents had saved enough to help pay for the non-scholarship-funded portion of my tuition, and I’d been presented with a card and a check for $500, for college expenses, Dad had clarified.

But when I expressed an interest in buying some camping equipment, they were confused.

“Aren’t you going to be living in a building?” Mom asked as we finished a non-whimsical stew. Mom had gotten a bit serious, worried. I did my best to recall some semblance of Everett’s charm over that special dinner those few months back.

“Well, yes, but there’ll be camping trips, and I’ll have time off and want to explore. And that old sleeping bag is kind of moldy. You don’t want me to be unprotected out there, do you?”

That clinched it. After claiming my intent to take the train into the city, despite the inevitable cumbersome packages of equipment, I was allowed to drive to Pittsburgh, which, I assured them, was the location of the best-equipped sporting goods store in the area.

What I didn’t tell them was that it was also less than a mile from the home of Everett’s father.

Chapter 27

Its emptiness puzzled me, but entering Mr. Forrester’s nearly bare condominium in the downtown section of Pittsburgh proved once again that I should have put aside any expectations about Everett’s disconnected family.

I didn’t want to get Holly involved, so I didn’t even tell her I’d be visiting. The possibility of both of us ganging up on her father didn’t feel right. I would tell her later and knew she would eventually understand.