White Rabbit(55)
“Yeah. Of course.” I looked at the space expanding between us. It was like the Atlantic Ocean.
The next day, I came in to school to learn that Eric had called Cody Barnes the second he’d left my house, and had reported everything I’d said; Cody, in turn, had alerted the entire rest of our class. The hallway was a shooting gallery, people pointing and whispering, popular guys coughing insults into their hands as I passed by, and when I reached my locker I saw that someone had drawn a squirting dick on it in black Sharpie. Things only got worse from there.
Cody was merciless with his taunting, his cruel names, his nasty jokes. He gave Eric plenty of grief as well: calling him my boyfriend, asking if I’d given him AIDS, and winding him up to the point where Eric finally announced—angry and panicked and apparently deadly serious—that he was thinking of reporting me to the principal for sexual harassment. Because I’d told him I liked him.
When I bumped into Eric in the hall on the way to our fifth-period math class, he shoved me as hard as he could into a bank of lockers, shouting, “Don’t fucking touch me, FAGGOT!”
It was the end of our friendship, and in spite of Lucy’s support and April’s unexpected kindness, I still felt like a wad of used toilet paper by the time school let out. I was nowhere near ready to face my mom with the news of my day, so I rode my bike to the park instead, climbing up onto a picnic table where I stared out at nothing for a while. I was so preoccupied with my misery that I didn’t realize I wasn’t alone until someone called my name. “Hey, Holt! ’Zat you?”
Glancing up, I froze. Standing around a cluster of motorcycles in the parking lot was a group of hard-looking adult-type dudes in jeans and leather, their cigarettes glowing in the gathering dusk like the red dots of snipers’ rifles; they exuded that kind of bored hostility that often portends mischief or violence, and I suddenly felt very alone. The tallest of the bikers, his shaved head a shiny, rose quartz dome, was ambling toward me. In a flash, I realized it was Eric’s older brother, Lyle.
The guy was twenty-one, and even though he had an apartment somewhere in South Burlington, it seemed like he was at Eric’s house more often than he wasn’t. I’d heard about the kind of trouble Lyle got into—vandalism, shoplifting, drugs, fistfights. I knew he’d been arrested before, and that my mom didn’t want me to hang out at the Shetlands’ if Lyle had his friends over, but this was the first time I’d felt afraid of him.
He closed the distance between us in just a few strides, and I went completely rigid, suddenly sure that Eric had sent him; instead of being reported to the principal, I was going to be stomped into the earth by Eric’s hell-raising sasquatch of a brother, from whom I didn’t have a single chance of escaping on my little three-speed Schwinn.
“Heard you had kind of a shit day,” Lyle grunted unexpectedly, plunking down beside me on the picnic table. Misinterpreting my startled expression, he added, “Small town. Rumors got nowhere to go but everywhere.” He looked at nothing with me for a moment, while I felt like someone standing on a land mine, waiting for it to go off. Then he spoke again, contemplatively. “I don’t know any homos, but I got nothin’ against ’em. My thing is, as long as somebody’s cool with me, I’m cool with them, you know? And I always thought you were a pretty cool little dude.”
I nodded. Although, truth be told, I’d have nodded at anything he said. Disagreeing with Lyle Shetland was tantamount to suicide.
“You’re the only one of Eric’s friends I ever liked,” he confided after another moment, surprising me yet again. “E’s a pretty good kid, but he hangs out with all these rich pricks—and wannabe rich pricks—and he’s startin’ to turn into one of ’em.” He looked down at me sympathetically. “You and I got a lot in common, actually. We’re both black sheep, and we both put up with a whole lotta crap, just gettin’ through the day. But only the tough survive, and you got my respect for surviving, Holt.” He stood up, jabbing a cigarette into his mouth, and offered me his fist to bump. “Life slings you shit sometimes, my man, and keeping your head up’s all you can do. So hang in there. You ever get in real trouble, or need some punks beat down, you call me—I mean it. I don’t like a lot of people, and I watch out for the ones I do.”
And with a friendly wave, he was gone.
*
Eric got shipped off to some boarding school that summer—ironically enough, to get him away from his older brother’s influence—and with him went the enduring reminder of my Coming Out story’s more sordid details. That suited me just fine, thanks, and revisiting the whole, ugly experience for the benefit of Sebastian and Lia is not a proposition that holds much appeal. Instead, I sum up my connection to Lyle Shetland by saying, “He once told me that if I was ever in trouble and needed something, I could call him. Well, this sure looks like Shit Creek to me, and he’s a guy with lots of paddles.”
Sebastian gives me a beseeching look. “Rufus.”
It takes willpower to ignore the plea in his eyes, but I manage it. Turning to Lia, I ask, “Do you know how I can get in touch with him, yes or no?”
She tosses her hands up and lets them flap down at her sides in disgust, giving up on me. “He and his boys hang out at this dive bar over near the airport—”
“Lia!” Sebastian turns on her, aggrieved, and she gives him an insolent shrug.