Something Like Summer (3 page)

Hoping that his luck would
change, Ben passed once again through Tim’s neighborhood on his way
home. Thanks to a squirrel with a death wish, Wilford was straining
against his leash so hard that Ben didn’t even notice the commotion
until a voice yelled out with enthusiasm.

“
Oh wow! I can’t fucking
believe it! Oh, sorry mom. It’s just so fu- freaking awesome! Thank
you!”

Ben gave one last desperate
tug on the leash and looked up. Tim was in his driveway jumping up
and down around a gleaming, black sports car. A scattering of
people watched him, amusement on their faces. Ben took in the
balloons taped to the garage doors just as someone said, “Happy
birthday.” Wilford chose this moment to circle a piece of grass
before squatting, bless him, allowing Ben to stand there and gawk
openly.

“
Thank you so much!” Tim
beamed across the car at a man who was the right age and build to
be his father before opening the door and diving inside. A second
later and the engine exploded into life with a roar. It revved a
few times before the passenger window rolled down. “Wanna go for a
ride?”

Ben almost said ‘yes’ out
loud. There was muttering from the family as they debated who would
go or the importance of driving safely. Ben couldn’t hear any of
this and had run out of time anyway. Wilford was already dragging
him away down the street.

He should have felt happy.
He had finally managed to see his dream guy again, but something
felt wrong in the pit of his stomach. Ben considered the feeling
and realized that it felt akin to having lost a game. The sports
car sped by, much too quickly for a final glance, before it tore
around the corner. To get a car like that for your birthday! His
parents must have been rolling in it. The unease in Ben’s stomach
increased.

That was it. Someone like
Tim had looks, a perfect body, and a rich family. He was probably a
jock and would instantly be popular, despite being new to the area.
The chances of Tim even noticing a scrawny outsider like Ben were
zero to none. The fantasy had been fun, but Ben abruptly felt as
though reality had burst in and crashed the party.

* * * * *

The first day of school was
not going as planned. Allison’s car had broken down the same day
that he had witnessed Tim getting the ultimate birthday gift. Ben
surmised that there was some cosmic harmony in this. One vehicle
had left the world as another was born into existence. Did cars
reincarnate? He doubted it. He was being dramatic anyway. Allison’s
car wasn’t dead. It just needed a new radiator line. Or was it a
sparkplug filter? Ben didn’t have the slightest idea what was wrong
with it. He just knew that the car being out of service meant he
had to share the bus with a bunch of nervous freshman and immature
sophomores. He didn’t even have the comfort of Allison’s company,
since her father had insisted on driving her to school.

Ben felt as though he could
easily be mistaken for a freshman as he disembarked from the bus.
He was slender and short for his age. Five feet nine inches wasn’t
bad really, but it was becoming apparent that he wouldn’t be
growing any taller. Alone and distracted, he probably appeared to
be arriving at high school for the first time in his life. A
disoriented freshman confirmed this, sidling up to him and asking,
“How do they expect us to find any of these classes? What’s 3E2
mean anyway?”

Ben only shrugged and
looked down at his own schedule, even though he knew that the ‘3’
referred to the floor, the ‘E’ to the east wing of the building,
and the final digit indicated the room number. His own first item
was 1W0. He didn’t need to read the class description to recognize
what that was–P.E., or physical embarrassment as he preferred to
call it. He swore under his breath and started toward the gymnasium
where he would be miserable for an hour every morning for the rest
of the semester.

Ben searched for any sign
of a familiar face as he pushed through the crowded hallways, but
the fates were against him today. He saw many people he recognized,
but most of them were the jocks and snobs he despised. The bell
rang as he stepped into gym, the hallways still full of baffled new
kids. Ben took solace in this. The coach would have to wait until
all of them found their way to the gym, the rest of the period
hopefully being taken up with issuing uniforms and other
trivialities.

He eyed the bleachers with
apprehension as he neared them and almost laughed with relief when
he saw Leon’s tall, stooped form sitting in the highest row, idly
toying with one of his dreads. Ben made a beeline for the one
person who had made last year’s P.E. classes bearable. He made it
to the top row of benches unscathed—even though some idiot tried to
trip him along the way—and sat down next to Leon, enjoying the
aromatic scent of marijuana that surrounded him like
cologne.

“
Hey, what’s up, big guy?”
Leon croaked in his all-too-typical stoner’s voice.

“
Nothing much. I can’t
believe we have to do this first thing in the morning. It’s child
abuse.”

“
At least it’s the last
year. There’s no P.E. for seniors.”

“
Lucky bastards,” Ben
muttered. “Hey, maybe the coaches will be too tired to bother
making us exercise.”

Leon would probably still
be too stoned to exercise, Ben realized. That meant Leon would be
relaxing on the sidelines instead of participating in whatever
idiotic sport was the choice of the week. There were a few times
last year when Leon’s stash had run dry, leaving him sober and
transforming him into an active and capable athlete. Ben hated
these times, because it meant he was left alone and defenseless,
when he usually would have been hiding behind Leon’s magical aura
that allowed him to get away with anything. Ben wasn’t sure what it
was exactly, but the coaches seemed to genuinely like Leon, despite
him being a modern day version of the people who protested against
the Vietnam War.

Ben let out a sigh as one
of these former servicemen came marching into the gymnasium, a
handful of nervous-looking freshman trailing along behind like
ducklings. There were four different coaches who taught P.E., but
the only way to tell them apart was their hair. They were all
stocky with limbs as thick as tree trunks. They might have been hot
back in their youth, but a war and way too many beers had graced
them all with tired faces and prominent guts.

This coach, the one with
thinning red hair, took attendance by bellowing out each of their
last names. Leon talked all through this, eagerly describing to Ben
his uncle’s collection of Laserdiscs that he had access to all
summer. Film was Leon’s topic of choice. If you knew your movies,
you were his friend.

“
Bendly?” coach
repeated.

Ben sighed, knowing that if
he corrected the man it would only make him a future target.
“Here,” he droned.

“
I see Steyer managed to
graduate from summer school,” the coach bantered, sending a pug
dog’s smile Leon’s way.

“
Hey, Coach!” Leon
answered happily. “They wanted to send me back to junior high but I
told them I’d miss you too much.”

Coach smiled and continued
the roll call. How did Leon do it? If Ben had tried that line he
would have been called a queer and told to go run a few
laps.

The rest of the period
crawled by. Forms for the gym clothes were passed out for them to
fill in and bring back the next day. To Ben’s despair, the mint
green uniforms that always smelled of body odor no matter how many
times they were laundered were passed out too, but thankfully there
wasn’t enough time for them to get changed and play anything.
Instead he spent the period listening to Leon talk about the Star
Wars movies that he took so seriously. When stoned, he treated the
events of the movies as if they were happening in the present along
with the rest of the world’s events.

“
Yoda
has
to know that Luke isn’t going to
be able to best Vader. He’s totally just playing the emotional card
and hoping to make Vader break down and cry or something,
right?”

Ben didn’t have time to
respond before the bell rang. He practically dived off the
bleachers in a single leap in his eagerness to reach the hallways
and look for Allison. Or Tim. Another new period meant another
chance for them to be in the same class. Neither of his targets
were spotted in the hallway, nor were they in his English class.
The next period was his first elective, Spanish, which also failed
to contain either of the people he was looking for. There was at
least an amusing conflict between the teacher and a kid from Mexico
who was looking to earn an easy A.

Lunch period brought relief
in the form of Allison. He found her at their usual meeting spot,
next to the vending machines in the large cafeteria that linked
both wings of the school. They had their choice of seats since they
both brought their lunches, while most of the other kids were
lining up to buy hot food. As much as Ben was tired of white bread
sandwiches, they were better than any of the food choices that the
school offered. There were legends of neighboring school districts
that allowed the fast food giants to cater for their students, but
this district wasn’t one of them. This “healthier” food was soggy
and flavorless. Even the soft drink machines were filled only with
sugar-free lemonade and some sort of chocolate drinks that didn’t
contain one grain of cocoa powder.

“
Ronnie Adams!” Allison
sang out as they sat down at their table.

“
Who?” Ben started
unpacking his lunch from the brown paper bag, wondering why the
name sounded familiar.

“
The fine black brother
from driver’s ed?” Allison prompted. “He’s in my home ec
class.”

Ben snorted and spit the
juice box straw from his mouth. “Are you telling me because you
think he might be gay?”

“
No!” Allison protested.
“There’s always straight guys on the prowl in home ec. Lord knows
that’s the only reason I’m taking it.
Anyway
, the nutty old teacher has us
sitting alphabetically, and by some miracle he’s the only ‘A’ and
I’m the only ‘C’ with no ‘B’s’ in the middle.”

“
See? It’s good that I
refused to take that class.”

“
You are forgiven,”
Allison said gracefully. “So how goes it with your ‘T?’”

“
Technically, it would be
‘W’ if we are going by last names,” Ben corrected. He had long ago
scoped out Tim’s mailbox and discovered that his family name was
Wyman, although thus far he had resisted scrawling
Ben Wyman
on any of his
notebooks. “Unfortunately it isn’t going anywhere. I was hoping you
had seen him.”

“
Nope,” Allison said,
swapping her Cheetos for Ben’s sour cream Pringles without having
to ask. “Maybe he goes to a private school or
something.”

“
Maybe,” Ben said,
glancing around the cafeteria. There were three different lunch
breaks, so there was a fair chance Tim wouldn’t share one with them
anyway. Ben was glad that he and Allison still shared a lunch
period for the third year in a row. He decided to turn his full
attention to her and put the whole matter out of his mind as much
as he could. Like so many other things in life, maybe what he
wanted wouldn’t come to pass if he thought too much about
it.

* * * * *

Fourth-period was math and
started out promising. There was an attractive guy in class named
Craig, who looked vaguely like Zack Morris if Ben squinched his
eyes up just right. Ben hadn’t talked to Craig since junior high,
after spending the night at his house.

What had come between them
was a fairly common story in Ben’s sordid history. It all began in
the seventh grade, when a routine sleepover at a friend’s house was
transformed by a pilfered porno. Watching the video together led to
trading hand jobs. This act was repeated during more sleepovers
until the time his friend claimed to be too tired to mess around
and insisted that they go to sleep instead. This confused Ben
until, after some less-than-casual tossing and turning, it became
obvious that something was expected from him. Ben happily went down
on his friend that night, for the first of many times, although the
favor was never returned.

Eventually, word of Ben’s
noble deed began to spread around the school, and guys he barely
knew were inviting him to stay over. The same routine was played
out over and over again, with his hosts usually pretending to be
asleep. On their backs. With their pants down. It was, needless to
say, a very exciting time in his life. The demand for his services
came to a screeching halt when he decided to come out of the closet
halfway through the school year. Suddenly none of the boys,
including the friend he first started experimenting with, wanted
anything to do with him. Craig was one of the last guys he had
messed around with before going public, and they hadn’t spoken
since.

Until today that is.
Instead of refusing to make contact, Craig greeted him warmly and
even chose a seat next to his. Hope began to burn in Ben’s chest
that Craig had come to terms with his own sexuality, which turned
out to be true but not in the way he expected. Craig soon began
ranting about the girlfriend he found over the summer. Obviously
their relationship had confirmed his heterosexuality and made it
possible to deal with the experimental phase that was now behind
him. No doubt getting laid regularly helped with this. Ben was
mildly disappointed, but happy to have a friend to make an
otherwise boring class more entertaining.