Taking Chances (17 page)

I resisted the urge to find a stick and poke him with it, something I had wanted to do to a dead body since I had seen
Stand By Me
. Instead, I went to the kitchen and made some coffee. I may only be seventeen, but I had a doctorate in dealing with drunks. I was the freaking Doogie Howser of enabling, and I knew what a Budweiser nap looked like from this distance. I also knew how to counter it.

Two parts caffeine, which was the coffee; one part pain relief, which was the aspirin I was grabbing; apply cold water, in this case a damp washcloth; and speak very, very softly. In this case that would be, “Mr. Parker? Are you awake?” Which was what you asked even though you knew the person wasn’t. I am not sure when this whole line of counterintuitive questions became the norm, but I know if I was passed out like that, someone asking me if I was awake would just piss me the hell off.

“Mr. Parker,” I tried again, this time poking his shoulder. “Are you awa—”

His hand snapped out and grabbed my wrist so fast, I swore I could hear that martial arts movie break as one eye stared up at me. In a voice barely above a growl, he asked. “Kyle? Why are you in my house?”

I tried to pull my hand back slowly, but there was no way I was getting it back unless he let go.

“Wow,” I exclaimed, looking at complete lack of effort he was exerting holding me tight. “You are crazy strong.”

His gaze followed mine to his hand and just like that, I was free. It took some effort not to go stumbling backward like a spaz, but I managed.

“Sorry,” he rattled off, not sounding the least bit sorry. “Now why the fuck are you in my house?”

I set the coffee down on the table in front of him. “Um, is that your final answer?” I asked, making sure I was more than an arm’s length away from him before I spoke.

He began to sit up and then cried out like he’d been shot. I saw his hands move over his head and it looked like he was trying to hold his skull together, which did nothing to deter from the visual that he had just been JFKed. “Coffee in front of you, bottle of aspirin next to it,” I said, making sure my voice never got above what I had determined was a drunk person’s pain threshold when spoken to. As he blindly reached out for the cup, I swore to myself I was never going to drink alcohol. Never ever.

“Little to the right,” I coached since he missed the table entirely the first three times.

On the forth he grabbed the cup and pulled it to his lips, looking way too much like Gollum from
The Lord of the Rings
. The way he cradled the coffee and sipped? I kid you not; if he said “My precious,” I might have just turned and run. After a few tentative swallows, he popped open the aspirin and downed a handful as if they were candy and then lay back down on the couch, putting the washcloth over his eyes.

“Thank you,” he croaked.

“All part of the service here at the Days Inn,” I mumbled as I sat back and watched him lie there. After about a minute, he looked out from under the washcloth and glanced over at me. I waved at him. “Hi, still here.”

Sighing, he covered his eyes again and asked, “Where’s Brad?”

“Not dead on my couch,” I answered quickly. Then I started laughing, because all I could hear in my head was Quentin Tarantino asking if there was a sign outside that said Dead Gay Guy Storage. Mr. Parker gave me a weird look—no, he gave me a look like I was weird, and I laughed more loudly. “Sorry, pop culture junkie. So… this about the guy you’ve been seeing?” I asked as bluntly as I could.

If he had been a cartoon, his jaw would have opened and then fallen off his face.

“How did you…,” he began to say, and then his brain caught up. “Did your mom…?” and then stopped again. “How did you…?” he started again. I think I broke Mr. Parker.

“Um, Brad told me he saw you with a guy, one of the Allman brothers?” I explained, a little fuzzy on the last part.

“Wallace brothers,” he corrected me, sounding like he was mortified.

“Right, them. He said you looked happy, which he made sound like it was not a normal way for you to look. So I assumed it meant you guys had met after all and were… dating? Hooking up? Something?” I thought about that for a moment. “Unless it was with another guy and just an Internet thing. In that case, it was probably about sex and you wouldn’t want to talk about that at all, which is understandable.” I looked up at him, knowing this was killing him. “Was it just a sex thing, Mr. Parker?”

Truth? I knew it wasn’t just a sex thing. In fact, I wasn’t sure guys that old still had sex, much less sex on the Internet. I know Brad’s mom had Facebook, which had to be the worst thing in the world since she practically made him add her as a friend, but besides that I didn’t know any sites old people used to hook up. So honestly, all I was doing was busting his balls, because it really looked like he was in a bad place and a little humor never hurt anyone.

“No,” he answered hoarsely. Realizing how bad he sounded, he took another sip of coffee. “It wasn’t a sex thing,” he admitted after a while. In a voice I barely heard, he added, “We never even had sex at all.”

“So then where is the Allman brother?”

“Wallace, his name is Matt Wallace,” he corrected me.

“So then where is Matt?” I asked him point-blank.

He ran a hand through his hair, which is something Brad did when he couldn’t think of what to say and was stalling for time. “We… well, he… he’s leaving,” he decided on.

What he said and what he meant were obviously two different things. What he said was “He’s leaving.” What he meant was “He’s leaving
me
.” I don’t like to brag, but I speak fluent Silence.

Now, here is one of the many differences between me and other guys my age. Most guys would have been all “aw shucks” about dealing with an adult as an equal and just talking to him. Most guys my age see adults as these weird aliens who say they used to be kids way back in the Stone Age but have no real memory of their time spent as “teenagers” so spout this crap they call wisdom that does absolutely nothing to help in the long run. They aren’t like the parents in the Peanuts cartoons where they speak in this weird language no one understands; they’re more like statues that just stand there in curious poses and dare us to decipher what they’re trying to say. Let me tell you, after about ten minutes playing Pictionary with a statue, you’ll walk away shaking your head wondering why you even tried in the first place.

I don’t see adults like that.

The adults I have interacted with in my long seventeen years of life have all struck me as being the same kind of person I was, only they had more experience at pretending to know what they were talking about. I mean, that’s the only difference, if you break it down. They have the same fears and the same worries that we do; they’ve just had time to build up this invisible shell around them that makes them seem like it doesn’t affect them at all. So in comparison, kids end up looking like we are one Red Bull away from an epileptic fit every time we encounter something outside our comfort zone.

But inside, they’re just as fucked up as we are.

“So he’s leaving and you’re okay with that,” I said distantly, as if I was mulling it over in my head. “I can understand that. I mean, with all the single men in Foster, why tie yourself down to just one guy? And it’s not like he’s cute as fuck and seems to like you too, so you dodged a bullet on that one.” I looked back at him and gave him the most sincere expression I could muster up. “I mean, as a burgeoning gay teenager, these are the life lessons I should take away from this, right?”

His eyes narrowed in suspicion as he carefully put down the coffee cup. “Does Brad know you’re an evil genius underneath all that hair?”

Grinning back, I said, “In his defense, he does know it and accepts that one day I might end up taking over the world, but don’t change the subject. If you like this guy and he’s leaving, why aren’t you stopping him?”

I don’t know who was more shocked that he didn’t have an answer, him or me.

“I have to go,” he said, standing up quickly. “I need….” He started patting his pockets down. “…my keys.” He looked around the room in a panic.

We searched for ten minutes before I found them stuck in the cushions of my TV chair. I tossed them to him. “Go get him, Mr. Parker.”

He almost sprinted out my door. “Thank you, and Kyle?” he asked as he opened the door. “Try to be a benevolent ruler when you take over.”

I shrugged. “I’ll consider it.”

He laughed as he slammed the door and ran to his car.

Grown-ups! What can you do about them?

I
REMEMBER
my dad used to have a bumper sticker that read “Teenagers, move out now while you know everything!” When I was a teenager, I thought it was insulting; as I got older, I thought it was fitting; and, finally, lately, I found it funny. After talking to Kyle, I’m not so sure that bumper sticker was wrong. If I had my head on as tight at seventeen as that kid seemed to at his age, I would… well, I’d probably be ruling the world myself. I could tell Kyle was a special guy when we’d talked at Nancy’s, but after that little sparring match at Linda’s, I understood a little more what Brad saw in him.

One of the only advantages of living in a town the size of Foster is that someone can get to anywhere from anywhere within five minutes if you know how to avoid the lights. When I pulled up in front of the Wallace house, I could see the rental car Matt had been driving was gone, and I felt my stomach lurch in fear. I ran up to the door and started banging on it, a little louder than I intended because I heard a scream of, “Marvin! They’re back!” which made no sense to me.

Matt’s dad swung open the door, a scowl on his face and a shotgun in his hand.

“Whoa!” I said, holding up my hands as I took a step back. “Mr. Wallace, it’s me! Tyler!”

“It’s just the Parker boy!” he shouted into the house, leaning the shotgun against the counter before he opened the screen door. “He’s gone, son. He left about twenty minutes ago for the airport.”

I felt like throwing up.

“What happened between you two?” he asked with real sadness in his voice. “I thought you guys were good together.”

So a teenage kid and now a grandfather tell me they could see something from afar that I had been blind to this whole time.

“I screwed up,” I admitted, feeling like sitting down and never getting up again.

“No,” he countered slowly. “You’re
screwing
it up. Game isn’t over until the clock stops.”

I nodded and looked up at the sky in an effort to keep my tears in my eyes and not running down my face. I had no idea what Mr. Wallace was talking about.

He sighed, reached up, and grabbed the front of my shirt. He hauled me down to eye level with him and talked in the same way you’d explain to a small child or a very slow adult. “You haven’t screwed it up. You are screwing it up as we speak.” I blinked in confusion. “Oh dear God! He’s probably still at the airport! If you hurry you can catch him before his flight takes off. Get a move on!”

I had given up on Matt twice without even trying. There wasn’t going to be a third time.

“Thank you, Mr. Wallace!” I called out, running back to my car as fast as I could.

I saw him roll his eyes as he made “move it!” motions with his free hand.

I had a plane to catch.

H
OW
sad is it I keep expecting him to show up?

Personally, I blame
Pretty Woman
. I mean, if a billionaire can fall in love with a call girl and come for her, then surely I have to rate at least one rescue? Of course, Tyler showing up would depend on him knowing I was leaving on this particular flight. Since I hadn’t called him, unless Tyler was psychic I was out of luck.

Not that I had squirreled away a huge amount of luck so far, but however small my stockpile was, it was now gone.

The worst part was that I couldn’t even blame this on bad luck since the odds of me running into him, him being gay, and him liking me were the statistical equivalent of winning three Powerball lotteries back to back. Fate had tossed a perfect sixty-yard Hail Mary right into my numbers, and I dropped the ball. I mean, what else could I do with that perfectly tossed pigskin
but
drop it? People like me weren’t meant to be happy. We were too sad, too gloomy for normal people to handle on an extended basis. Sophia had told me repeatedly—I wore my sorrow like a raincoat and no matter how sunny a day might be, there I was, all ready for rain.

I waited at the rental car place for a good ten minutes hoping he’d show up.

When I heard my flight called on the PA, I sighed to myself quietly and made my way to the gate. When the clerk handed me my boarding pass, I felt like she was handing me a death sentence of sorts. I was being sentenced to life—a life spent alone and miserable.

I said nothing as I took it and plodded down the Jetway to my flight.

I’
VE
heard a lot of complaints about the changes to the world since 9/11; most of the time, I ignored them.

I mean, showing up hours before a flight sucks and no one likes taking their shoes off while going through security, but I never really had a problem with those restrictions. In fact, I was pro-airline security so far, because I didn’t like much thinking about the consequences if we didn’t do all that. Right until I needed to get to Matt.

Turns out, no one likes a full-grown man running into an airport making a mad dash toward the security gate like he was on fire.

It honestly hadn’t even occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to get to Matt once I made it to the terminal. I had this whole image of catching him just as he boarded his flight, turning him around, and giving him a kiss so strong he’d swoon into my arms. I’m talking a full-blown dip-and-bend-your-knees kind of kiss that you lose time in because you’re holding your breath during it.

I did not imagine having two TSA guards eying me like I had a shoe full of explosives. Did that guy have a shoe full of explosives? Is that what happened? Now that I think about it, how do you use a shoe bomb without blowing your foot off? Well, I guess if your plot is to take a plane down, you aren’t worried about your foot.