Fan Art (19 page)

“Why?” she whispers back.

“I don’t want—you know.”

“You mean you don’t want to come out of the—” she starts.

But I reach over and press her lips shut.

“Cwosits ave wery wittle wentilashoon,” she mumbles through my fingers.

“What?” I ask, moving my hand away.

“Closets have very little ventilation, Jamie.”

“Very funny.”

“I thought you were going to tell Mason when you went to McCall.”

“Huh? No. Where’d you get that idea?”

Eden’s own hand jumps to her lips. She shakes her head.

I roll my eyes.

“Well, I didn’t. So I’d appreciate it if you—and your friends—wouldn’t either,” I explain as I remember what I
did
tell Mason.
That Eden was a lesbian.

“Okay. Okay.”

“But you are out, right?” I ask. “At school?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Except that my parents keep pushing me back in.”

“So doesn’t make any sense,” I say, half wondering how God divvied up the parents. My mom
wants
me to be out.

The bell rings.

Eden hooks her thumb in the direction of her first class. It’s in the opposite direction from mine. “See you in art?” she asks.

“Uh-huh,” I agree.

During announcements, Principal Chambers’s no-nonsense voice rings out over the loudspeaker. “If any student has information about the writing on the gym wall or about the defacing of the statue of President Lincoln in the front quad, please report what you know to the front
office. Your name will be kept confidential.”

I laugh. No one will turn anyone in. It’d be like raising your hand and saying, “I was there!”

I’m stretching my hamstrings on the edge of the track when I see the others spill out of the building. There’s several Frisbees being tossed among them—probably another Brodie-inspired soccer-unit replacement. They fan out over the football field, except for Brodie, who stands in the end zone. When everyone appears to be in place, Brodie shouts, “Fifty alive!”

The group trips over themselves, trying to catch the disc before it hits the ground. Some end up sprawled on the grass, except Mason, who emerges unharmed with the Frisbee—and fifty points. I let out a whoop and he looks my way with an ear-to-ear grin. His glasses are off and he’s wearing a threadbare Lincoln Lions tee, sunshine yellow and snug across the chest.

He gestures for me to join them.

I shake my head. Because there is no way I’d be able to catch a Frisbee with him smiling at me like that.

I finish my mile and take a shower. I’m dressed and almost out the locker room door when I hear the Redneck roll his neck behind me, his bones popping like far-off fireworks.

“Fagmag,” Nick says. “You tell the principal I made Abe into a dick?”

“No,” I say. “Why? You get called into Chambers’s chambers?”

“Yeah.” His fists planted on his hips, each as big as a dodgeball. “She knew I was there—like someone narced on me.”

“Uh, maybe someone saw your truck there?” I take a guess. Or saw the photos on Facebook.
Crap.

“You better not rat,” he warns.

“Why would I rat?” I ask him. “I’d be in trouble too.”
Idiot.

He looks me up and down, maybe trying to decide if I’d tattle, or maybe to see if I’d make a nice lunch. “I know you messed with the fag mag,” he tells me.

Messed with
Gumshoe?
Double crap
. How does he know about that? Oh, yeah. Challis helped me with it. Challis and Eden are friends. And he’s Eden’s brother. “Yeah,” I agree. “And since you didn’t rat on me, I won’t rat on you.”

I watch his face as my words sink in. His face lights up real slow, as if it’s on a dimmer switch. “Yeah, cool,” he says.

And I hope he means it.

At first I think the whole school overheard Eden in the hall earlier this morning, because everyone is looking at me, saying “hey” or smiling as if I’m their new best friend. The I’m-pretty-sure-is-gay sophomore who wears
tie-dye shirts cuffs me on the shoulder and says, “Cool” when he passes me in the hall. I do a 180 and watch him walk away.
Huh?

I feel like a celebrity—albeit an outed one—until I see Brodie and Kellen in the cafeteria at lunch. Our table, which is normally pretty tame at the end where Mason and I sit, is teaming with students. And it’s pretty clear that they are the celebrities, not me.

“Like, how did you get the idea?” a blond junior asks Brodie.

“Abe is kinda tall, you know,” he replies. “And has a hat on his head.”

The girl giggles, a
tee-hee-hee
sound escaping from around her blue-polished fingernails. The guys laugh. “Head,” they repeat.

Mason plunks a stack of textbooks down, his day planner on top. “The average IQ around this place has gone into the crapper.” He nods to indicate the newcomers.

“Heck,” I say. “It just doubled, now that you’re here.”

His lips form a swearword that he doesn’t say out loud. “I asked for that one.”

“Sorry,” I say.

“Whaddaya want?” He is asking about lunch.

“Pizza,” I say, and hand him my caf card. “Fries.”

“Save me a seat,” he says, and escapes.

“Jamie!” Brodie bellows. “Now that man’s an artiste!”

The blond girl’s head swivels my direction. And soon the whole crowd is looking at me.

“He’s the one that did all the work—taping and sculpting,” Brodie explains out loud while his hands gesture the shaping of a very large penis.

My face heats up faster than a propane grill.

“Really?” the blond-and-blue girl asks, easing away from Brodie and closer to me. “That was a lot of work.”

I force a smile.

“I’d, like, never have the guts to do something like that,” she says, now so close I can smell her shampoo. “Are you gonna get suspended?”

My smile warps into a gape.

Her touch on my arm doesn’t help.

I gulp in a lump of air, wonder if I
will
get suspended—it wasn’t like we disassembled the principal’s car and reassembled it on the roof like the class of 1977 was rumored to have done. And we didn’t flood the basement in an attempt to make an indoor swimming pool (class of 1985), and we didn’t photocopy hundreds of exams stolen from teacher’s desks and briefcases and drop them down stairwells and off the roof (class of 1991). We just wrapped ol’ Abe in a little insulation and covered him with a plastic bag in case it rained—and the chalk murals, they were gone too, thanks to a power washer. I say, “I hope not.”

“Oh, but it’d be so cool. I mean, like, we could all
protest for you,” she coos.

I wince. Then decide that the best way to get rid of horny girls is to ignore them. I sit down in the seat closest to Mason’s books. I open the first thing I lay my hands on and pretend I’m busy reading.

Only it isn’t a book.

It’s his day planner.

And I’m open to April. There with rows of tiny printed letters in each of the calendar squares—homework assignments, tests, and my band concert tomorrow night. I can read those. I can even read some of the Spanish.
Trabajo
on the days he has to work. But there are other notes. Not in either language. Like on this past Friday—the day we went to McCall—there’s several sentences.

In French.

And even though I can’t read them, I feel guilty. I snap the planner shut.

Blond-and-blue girl has moved on to drooling over Kellen, and Hailey Beth—his girlfriend—is doing her best to fend her off.

And so my fifteen minutes of fame faded into oblivion, no one noticing that I’m gay or even caring enough not to hit on me. I breathe a sigh of relief.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

THIRTY-ONE

After school, I get a text
from Mason.
Car is ready. Can I drive it?

I think about my clutch. And how Mason doesn’t drive stick. And how my mother would kill me if someone else ended up in a fender bender on my already-very-expensive insurance. Then I figure that Mason can probably learn anything—especially about cars—in six seconds flat. And the garage is only a few miles away. He is my best friend. I text him back.
Sure.

Soon I hear a car pull into the driveway, purring as it idles. I look out my window and see my car—the once blue paint worn away at the edges, the bumper scratched, and the passenger side of the windshield marred by a spider-shaped scar from a rock chip repair gone bad. I guess Mason couldn’t fix everything about it. I bound down the stairs and out the door, still in my bare feet.

Mason is putting the hood up, still wearing his gray
shirt with his name embroidered over one pocket. I join him.

“New alternator.” He points to the only shiny item under the hood. “The battery’s past due but fine. And this belt here”—more pointing, this time at a bunch of whirring parts that must be the engine—“is pretty worn.”

“Oh,” I say. “Okay.” It’s kind of hard to see.

“So before we go up to Pullman, she’s gonna need a new one.”

“Moscow,” I say, putting my college destination on the map.

“And I tuned her up.”

“Wow,” I say. “Thanks.”

Mason shuts the hood and motions for me to climb in. My knees brush the dash and I scoot the seat back.

Now sitting in the passenger seat, Mason reaches over and flips up my sun visor. “This is an oil change sticker,” he says, pointing to one of two new additions to my windshield.

“Oh,” I say. “So that’s what they look like?”

He ignores my sarcasm. “And when the odometer gets to 153,024, the oil needs to be changed.”

“Okay.”

“And your tires—they’re at about half tread—should be rotated at about 159–160.”

“You rotated my tires?” I ask, deducing the fact from the new sticker.

“Yeah,” he says, a little Jamie-you’re-being-stupid tone in his voice.

“You didn’t have to,” I say.

“Um, yeah. For when we drive her to Pullman,” he says. “We gotta take good care of this baby.”

I get an urge to grab him behind the ears, kiss him on the mouth.

But I don’t.

I take in a long yoga breath of warm, purring-car air. Mason said “we”—as if my car now belonged to both of us.
And all the work he did?
Rotating the tires, tuning the engine, and changing the oil. It’s an apology-thank-you-I-love-you-man all in one. This is my moment.
Say it. Come out.

Now.

“Mason?” I ask, and tell myself I shouldn’t look at him. I fix my eyes on the sun shining onto the corroded windshield. It’s blinding, but better than watching Mason’s face when I say what I’m going to say.

“Jamie?” he asks as if my name were musical.

“I, uh—” I get the first word out, but stop when pain stabs me between my eyebrows. I close my eyes, and spots swirl under my lids.
Another yoga breath
, I promise myself.
Then I’ll say it.

I breathe in as slowly as possible, and when I get lightheaded, I let the air whoosh out. I gather my courage, open my eyes, and look at my best friend since third
grade, and say, “Um, uh. Yeah. I—Um. Thank you?”

“No problem,” Mason says. “I probably should have tuned her up before the trip—then we wouldn’t have gotten stranded.”

I didn’t say it.
“Next time,” I say half to myself and half to him. “Before we leave in August.”

“I can’t efffin’ wait!”

But I can, or I have to, because I can’t seem to get the words past my lips.

I chickened out. Maybe because I don’t think I could handle anything less than complete acceptance, as if even the slightest hesitation on Mason’s part would shatter me, break my fragile hold on sanity, and leave me in pieces on the threshold before I stepped out into the world. Or maybe because coming out to Mason will change everything in more ways than I can count, even his half-hugs and head rubs—obviously meant to ruin every good hair day and tease me about my vanity. And definitely because coming out is something I can’t take back; coming out would be forever mine, for better or for worse.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

THIRTY-TWO

Eden passes me a folded square
of drawing paper.
You owe me a dollar.

I look up at the very last art history slide: an illustration I’d seen on a book jacket in the school library. It’s by Nick Gaetano, an actual, living artist.
Dang it.
I didn’t think Ms. Maude would finish before the end of the year. And we have another week of class. I’m pulling out my wallet and looking for a dollar among the receipts when the lights flash on.

“We’ve got about twenty minutes,” Ms. Maude announces. “So let’s spend some time working on our self-portraits.”

I hand Eden a dollar so soft it feels like fabric.

“So,” she says, “now that I’m rich, let’s go out. My treat.”

“Sure,” I say.

“After school?” she asks.

“Can’t. Band concert’s tonight.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“Come,” I say. “We can do something after.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” I say, catching Ms. Maude looking in our direction with one eyebrow quirked as if to ask why we weren’t getting to work. “Of course,” I whisper. Then I go to the back of the room to retrieve my project from the shelves. I pick up a hand mirror from a basket Ms. Maude keeps for this assignment.

I open my pad of paper to my self-portrait. I have the profile drawn in, my carefully messy hair, my forehead, nose and lips, and chin down to my squarish Adam’s apple. That was the easy part. The part where I’m looking at the viewer is harder.

I study my reflection. Smile. Frown. I turn my head, look back into the mirror, and laugh because I look like a total doof. I decide to face front and sketch my right eye. I start with the lids, then the iris and pupil. I sketch in a highlight, a few eyelashes, but not too many so I don’t look like a girl. I shade in the shadows, the curve of the cornea.