Being True (8 page)

S
HORTLY
AFTER
arriving to first period, Claudia marched up to Mr. Rodriguez to announce I’d be sitting next to her from now on. Since there was an open seat to her right, Mr. Rodriguez nodded.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said as I moved my stuff to my new seat, but I wasn’t very convincing. It was nice to feel as if I had the beginning of a safety net in this school.

“Yeah, well, we aren’t dating or anything,” she said, trying to be her usual indifferent self. “So don’t get any ideas.”

I chuckled. “I’ll consider myself warned.”

“Besides, anyone who can get a quote and pic from Javi Castillo is an investment I intend to keep my eye on.”

The noisy entrance of some of our classmates drew my attention to the classroom door. I held my breath. Within the next few minutes, Rance Parker and his twisted scowl would enter and drain all light from my world.

“He’ll be late,” Claudia said. “He always is.”

I turned to face her. “Rance?”

Claudia’s face scrunched in disgust. “Oh, God no! I’m talking about Javi,” she said. “Not Rancid Puker. I loathe that idiot more than I do misogynists and bigotry. Of course, with Rancid, that’s just being redundant.”

I laughed so loudly, I drew Mr. Rodriguez’s silent disapproval. Rancid Puker? That was perhaps the funniest name I’d ever heard in my life. “Yeah, well, I’m not a big fan either. And the feeling’s mutual.”

“I thought so,” she said with a nod. “Rance is responsible for your face, isn’t he?”

Crap! I should have been more careful. Now that I’d been asked a point-blank question, I couldn’t lie. “Just don’t tell Javi.”

“What? Why not?”

“They’re best friends.”

She stared at me as if I was stupid. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“I just don’t want Javi to know. Okay?” The desperation in my voice was apparent. Hopefully, it would be enough to convince Claudia to keep my secret.

The bell rang, announcing class had begun. Two seconds later Javi scrambled into the classroom, his charming half grin plastered on his face.

Mr. Rodriguez shook his head in exasperation and nodded for Javi to take his seat. Javi did but not before saying, “Hey, Tru,” in front of the whole class.

My cheeks once again burned as I returned his greeting, and my cock jumped up to say hello too. The entire class did a repeat of their expressions yesterday. They stared at me with mouths agape.

“He’s not an idiot, you know,” Claudia whispered from her seat. “He’ll figure it out.”

“Maybe he will,” I answered. “But I won’t tell him. And I hope you won’t either.”

She sighed in resignation. “Fine, I won’t say anything.”

“Thank you.”

“But I still think it’s stupid,” she said.

I could live with that. What I couldn’t live with was Javi exiting my life as quickly as he had entered it. It wasn’t a chance I was willing to take.

“Where’s Mr. Parker?” Mr. Rodriguez asked as he took roll.

“He’s in ISS,” Rance’s girlfriend, Lucy, announced. She narrowed her rich green eyes, which were obviously the result of tinted contacts, at me from where she sat a few rows over. She knew what had happened yesterday, and if Rance had been given in-school suspension for hitting me, then Lucy no doubt held me responsible for it.

But what worried me the most right now was whether or not Javi had seen the blame in her eyes. If he had, then he might put two and two together.

But Javi was as astonished as everyone else. Even the back row Jock Brigade. “What the hell happened?” he asked.

“Please watch your language in my classroom, Mr. Castillo,” Mr. Rodriguez said.

“Why don’t you ask your friend?” Lucy commented before slowly looking away from me.

“I will,” Javi replied. Javi’s broad shoulders slumped. Knowing a friend was in trouble evidently greatly affected him. So much so that he missed Lucy’s sarcasm.

She hadn’t been referring to Rance. She’d been talking about me.

M
Y
DAY
without Rance went on without a hitch. I was still ignored by everyone except Javi and Claudia. Although he and I only had first period together, he made it a point to stop and chat with me between classes, which made me feel special. It also deepened my already growing affection for him.

It was a precarious situation. As an awkward outcast, I appreciated how Javi’s attention made me less of a pariah. But as a gay boy who’d never had the attention of any other boy before, much less the popular, hot athlete, well, I worried I would be unable to control, much less hide, my emotions.

That, more than Rance tossing me around the locker room like a chew toy, might destroy our newfound friendship.

Whenever Javi turned his lopsided grin my way, or he nudged me after teasing me about proper bike riding, my heart thudded in my chest and beads of sweat broke across my flesh. As for what happened inside my jeans, that was why God made thick history books. Although from the grimace on George Washington’s face, which graced the cover of my textbook, he was getting tired of being poked in the eye.

Thankfully, Claudia usually arrived to save me from myself. Like Rance, she was in the majority of my classes, and we walked to each one together. She even ate lunch with me, which was a first. I’d grown so accustomed to gobbling down my food in solitary silence, I’d almost forgotten how to speak.

Around Claudia, though, that didn’t matter. She preferred to do the talking rather than the listening, which suited me fine.

We were in sixth period journalism, working on the layout for the Friday edition of the paper, when she switched to an uncomfortable subject.

“So, tell me about you.”

I’d rather drink a gallon of bleach than discuss my life. Claudia’s persistent gaze, however, indicated she wouldn’t be put off. And neither would Stewie. The cartoon character on her shirt regarded me with disdain, as if the next words out of his mouth might be, “Speak, you imbecile. Or die!” I’d either answer her questions, or she and Stewie would find some bleach and empty its contents down my throat for me.

“I’m not really very interesting,” I answered, waiting to see if Stewie would leap out of the fabric. “Just your standard high school student exiled to the land of misfit toys.”

“Love the Rudolph reference,” she said with a click of her tongue. Whenever Claudia really liked something, she made that unusual sound. “But we’re not talking about our favorite childhood Christmas specials. We’re talking about you.”

“I think the adventures of Rudolph and Hermey are far more exciting.”

“Is that because you’ve never fit in?”

She was really going to make me do this, wasn’t she? Her raised eyebrow resembled half an arch on a McDonald’s sign. “Nope. Never,” I finally answered.

“You’re not the only one,” she added. “When I was a kid, all the other girls obsessed over unicorns and rainbows. Witches, magic, and vampires fascinated me. Probably because my grandmother was a
curandera
in Mexico.”

“Really?” I asked. I’d heard about traditional Mexican faith healers, who were revered in the Hispanic culture, but I’d never met anyone who knew one.

She nodded. “She taught me a whole bunch of stuff while she was alive. Like how to ward off the evil eye.”

“How do you do that?” I asked, hoping to divert Claudia’s attention away from me and onto her grandmother. If I could distract her for another thirty minutes, I’d escape the Claudia Zamora inquisition she was about to launch.

Claudia opened her mouth to answer but said nothing. She drew her lips together in a slant that mimicked Stewie’s expression on her shirt. “Nice try,” she said. “But I’m far too clever to fall for that.”

Well, crap. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Like hell you don’t,” she said before punching my arm.

“Hey, that hurt!” I complained, making a bigger deal of the pain than there was. I grasped my shoulder and scrunched up my face as if I’d eaten a whole bag of lemons.

“Oh, my God,” she said in utter exasperation. “You’re such a drama queen.” Her eyes grew saucer-wide, and she covered her mouth with her hand.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Why?”

“For calling you a queen,” she said. “That’s probably one of the reasons you don’t fit in, right? Because you’re gay?”

Was it
that
obvious? But since she’d asked me directly, I had nowhere else to go but with the truth. “How’d you know?”

She shrugged as she brushed the black and purple strands from her fair skin. “I have a cousin who’s gay. He’s a junior in college. He and I have always been super close. More like brother and sister really. And you sort of remind me of him.”

“Which I’m assuming is a good thing.”

“It’s a great thing,” she said, beaming. The love she had for her cousin couldn’t have been more evident if she’d been holding up a gay pride sign. “Which is probably why I liked you almost instantly. That doesn’t happen very often. I usually hate most people because, well, most people suck donkey dick.”

I chuckled. I couldn’t argue with that. “That they do.”

“Do you get bullied about it a lot?” she asked. Her tone had softened to a sympathetic whisper.

“Yeah. And it’s not like I tell people. The only ones who know are my mom and grandparents. But it seems like people look at me and immediately see a fairy.”

“I don’t like derogatory names,” she said. “A woman isn’t a bitch. A black man isn’t the N-word, and gay people are
not
fairies.”

What planet had Claudia Zamora come from? Most people insisted on labeling others. “Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to offend.”

“You shouldn’t worry about offending me,” she said bluntly. “You should be offended by the name. By calling yourself a fairy, you take on the negative power everyone else gives that word. You should love yourself more than that. That’s all.”

I nodded. Claudia was right. I did need to love myself. It was difficult to do that, though, when so many people hated you for just being you. “I’ll work on that.”

“You’d better,” she said with another jab to my arm. This time I didn’t pretend to be hurt. I took it like a man.

“So is that why you came to Burbank? Because you’d been getting bullied?”

I sighed. “Being bullied” didn’t adequately explain what I’d suffered through five high schools and three junior highs. “Yeah. This is my sixth school.”

“Fuck!” She gritted her teeth. “That’s rough.”

“It hasn’t been easy,” I agreed. “Especially for my mom. It breaks her heart every time she sees me banged up. It’s like they’re kicking her in the stomach, and every time I see that sadness, I feel like I’ve failed her. That I should somehow be stronger and beat up the guys who use me for a punching bag. But I’m no match for them. I’m not big or strong. I’m just me.”

“Well, I think who you are is pretty damn great so far.”

No one besides my family had ever told me that before. “But you don’t really know me,” I said. “I could be some jerk or a gay who hates breeders.”

She gazed deeply into my eyes, searching deep within my soul. When she found what she was looking for, she shook her head. “Nope. You’re just as I thought you were.”

“And what am I?”

“You’re a good guy with a big heart. I can see that as plainly as the scabs on your face. I don’t think there’s one spiteful bone in your body or that you could hate anyone. Not even Rancid Puker, the worthless fuck.”

Although I hated to agree with her, she was right about the last part. I didn’t hate Rance, or any of the other bullies who’d made my life hell. I pitied them. To inflict that much pain on someone spoke more about their internal suffering. “Well, some might say that makes me a spineless coward. To quote my stepfather, ‘A man stands his ground. He speaks his mind. He doesn’t give a fuck about anyone else.’”

Claudia gritted her teeth again. She only did that when she didn’t like what she was hearing. “He sounds like an asshole.”

“You’re being far too kind.”

A smile briefly lit up her face. “I don’t know if anyone’s ever told me that before.”

The computer beeped. The photos had finally started to upload on the slow-ass machine. In a few moments, we would see the photos I’d snapped of Javi and me.

“Is your mom still married to your stepdad?” she asked once they were done.

I shook my head. “He’s dead. Drove his car into an approaching semi.”

“Holy shit!” She crossed herself and said a silent prayer. “Why didn’t you tell me I was speaking ill of the dead?”

“I think God will forgive you because I’m pretty sure he’s not up there anyway.” Not many people knew the details of my life with Bart Cox, so I surprised myself by providing them without being asked. I revealed everything: how Bart used to hit my mother and me when he was drunk, how he’d worked at some accounting firm and embezzled money. He’d even lost most of the more than two hundred grand my mother had received in death benefits from the city when my dad, a police officer, was killed in the line of duty. Then, to get their money back, Bart’s company went after all of his assets, and since my mother was married to him, that included everything they’d owned together. My mother was left with nothing besides Bart’s debts that she had to work like crazy to pay off. The only possessions we still had were the few items she’d owned when she was married to my real dad, and we had to pinch every penny we had in order to squeak by every month.

“Holy shit!” she exclaimed again when I was done. “And most everyone in this school thinks
they
have it rough.”

“We all have it rough. It’s just a different kind of rough for everyone.”

Claudia stared at me in silence. For probably the first time in her life, someone had made her speechless. That didn’t last long. “I’ve never met anyone like you, Truman Cobbler.”

“Likewise,” I said with a click of my tongue.

She wrinkled her nose. “Don’t make that noise,” she said. “It’s weird.”

I almost burst out laughing. She clearly didn’t realize she did the same thing.

I was just about to let Claudia in on the joke, when her confused expression changed to complete shock. If her mouth had hung any lower, she’d be a character in
Family Guy
.