None of the Above(31)

“Do you ever just wish that you could find the guy who coined the phrase ‘Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me’ and smash his face in?”

I turned to stare at him.

“You know. Some words are just . . . they trigger actual physical pain. Like the word faggot.”

I winced.

“See?” Darren said matter-of-factly. “You look like someone just sucker-punched you. Other words don’t do that. I mean, the word gay is totally okay, even if it does sound kind of dippy sometimes. Queer sounds kind of cute, and lesbian is almost, like, classy sounding.”

When I didn’t say anything, Darren went on. “After my dad came out, I totally used to flinch whenever I heard the word gay. Even when it wasn’t actually used to mean ‘homosexual.’ Like, I remember watching the movie Camelot with my sister when she was in her King Arthur phase. There’s this song in it called ‘The Lusty Month of May,’ and one of the parts is something like ‘It’s wild! It’s gay!’ and I remember wanting to curl up and die.

“Once in a while some jerk-off on the bus would call me a faggot, or say I was gay because my dad was, and my mom would tell me, ‘Don’t let other people’s labels define you,’ and make me a strawberry shortcake or something. But I’ll be honest, it never helped.”

As we neared the school, I asked, “What did?”

“Well, it helped that most people were cool with it. I mean, we’re in the twenty-first century, and in a lot of places, you’re more likely to be ostracized if you’re homophobic than if you’re gay.”

But not all, I thought.

“The biggest thing that made me get over it, once I stopped hating my dad,” Darren continued, “was that I realized what an insult it was to my father to think that my life had ended just because people thought I was gay.” Another gust of wind blew, and Darren hunched his shoulders against the cold. “You never knew my dad, but he was a kick-ass father. He was the kind of dad who loved baseball and taught you how to play catch when you were in kindergarten, but didn’t pressure you when you said you wanted to quit in fourth grade after batting 0.177 and almost falling asleep in center field during the last game of the season.”

“I think I remember him,” I said. “He always used to come to our elementary school concerts. A big guy, right?”

“Yeah, he’s like six foot four, two hundred twenty. He always blamed my mom’s cooking for the last forty pounds.”

“Do you see him often?”

“Not as much, since he moved down to the city. Three or four times a year.”

“It must have sucked when he left.”

“Like, epic levels of suck,” Darren said. I grinned despite myself. His smile back was shy, and I had a pang of regret that we had stopped hanging out after our parents broke up.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Darren shrugged. “Time heals all wounds, and all that crap. So, how about you? Are you going to be all right?” He turned toward me, and I couldn’t figure out if he was asking about my AIS, or almost getting run over by a car.

I chose to assume it was the latter. “I’m okay. It was just a little tap. I can’t believe I was so stupid. I must’ve missed that class in kindergarten when they taught us to look both ways when we crossed the street.”

“Yeah, well.” He brushed his hair out of his eyes and looked down at me with an expression I couldn’t read. “You gotta take care of yourself, okay?”

“Okay.”

Darren held my gaze for one more second, and loped off to his class.

As I walked to American History, I decided that I hadn’t actually tried to kill myself. At least, not really. Maybe for the teeniest fraction of a second, I’d kind of thought that it would be easier if I could just go to sleep and never wake up, but I wasn’t sure if that counted.

What hadn’t been done, hadn’t been done. And it wouldn’t ever be. I could never do that to my dad, and I had to remember that no matter how dark things seemed, now it would get better. It had to.

I must’ve looked half frozen when I got to American History, because Jessica Riley looked at me funny when I sat down next to her. When I caught her staring at me, she jerked her head down quickly to look at her spiral notebook, and I thought that was the end of that. But a minute later, before class had begun, she turned to me and asked, “Do you, um, know when we’re supposed to do the yearbook photos? For Homecoming? And are we supposed to wear our dresses?”

I blinked. I had forgotten that the Homecoming Court had a special spread in the yearbook. It seemed strange that they wouldn’t cancel it this year; I mean, would Sam really want to have his picture taken with me?

“I think they do it in the spring, together with prom pictures, but maybe you should ask Faith. She’s always on top of those things.” I made an effort to make my voice sound normal.

Jessica nodded, and took a closer look at my eyes. “Are you okay? You look like you might be catching a cold or something.”

It would actually be nice to be sick and have an excuse to stay home from school.

We were on a unit on women’s suffrage, and I couldn’t concentrate on my notes. I felt queasy the whole class. It wasn’t until the middle of class, when Mr. Morris read an Elizabeth Cady Stanton quote out loud, that I realized what bothered me.