Jumbo (12 page)

As the sun started to go down, Mitchell came inside and took the puppy up to his room. Sally’s bed had been thrown away, though Mitchell would have to get a new bed anyway. He wouldn’t have wanted the puppy sleeping on Sally’s bed. He found an old blanket in the press and folded it into a bed. He tried to get the puppy to sit on it, but all he wanted to do was jump up onto Mitchell’s bed. That night, Mitchell let him, and he slept with the puppy, sleeping with his arms around him and figuring that everything was okay.

27

The following day, Sunday, Mitchell resolved to have a conversation with Pete — to tell Pete that he was gay, and to tell him some of the stuff that had been going on at school. He meant to do it in the morning, though it was after lunch before he had worked up the courage. He walked through the bathroom and knocked on Pete’s door. There was no answer, so he knocked a little louder.

“Yeah. Come in”

Pete was lying on his bed, pulling his headphones off his head. He had rearranged his room in the last few months, had taken his old posters down, and in a rare show of energy, repainted the walls, moved the furniture, and put up some abstract prints. The room was bathed in a soft glow of light from a standard lamp. The curtains were closed, and there was a sweet smell of incense burning.

“Can I talk to you about something?”

Pete frowned. “Yeah.”

Mitchell closed Pete’s bathroom door and walked into the room. Pete sat up and Mitchell wheeled his chair over.

Silence, until it was uncomfortable.

“Shoot,” Pete said.

Mitchell took a deep breath. “I don’t know how to say this, so I’ll just say it. I’m gay.”

Pete paused for a second. “Yeah. I figured.”

“Are you ...?”

Pete shook his head.

“I thought you were.”

“No. I mean — I like guys, but I like girls too. I suppose I’m bisexual. Most people are.”

“Most people?”

“Yeah.”

Mitchell frowned. “I thought most people were straight.”

“You’d think so, but I don’t think it’s like that — not really.”

“Yeah?”

“Have you heard of the Kinsey Scale?”

Mitchell shook his head.

“It’s this theory. This guy called Kinsey reckoned that most people like both men and women — at least to some extent — and there’s only around ten percent of people who are really gay or straight.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It’s like some straight people are a little gay, some gay people are a little straight, some people are right in the middle, and then some people really are gay or straight — but they’re a minority.”

Mitchell nodded.

“So most people are bi — according to him.”

“I think I’m gay.”

“You’re probably not. I mean, if he’s right, you probably do like girls, even a little.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Does it matter?”

Mitchell shrugged. They stared at each other in silence, and then Mitchell exhaled. “Wow. That was a lot easier than I thought it’d be.”

“Am I the first person you’ve told?”

“Yeah — no, the second.”

“Who else have you told?”

“Luke.”

“Bet that didn’t go down too well.”

Mitchell shook his head.

“Oh, Mitch, you’re like a loose cannon. This innocence thing — at one time I thought it was an act, but you really are naive, aren’t you?”

“You think?”

Pete nodded.

“How does that make me a loose cannon?”

“Well, you’re going around without the first understanding of how other people think. This thing with Luke, I’ve been watching you for years. At one time I thought it might work out for you. At one time I thought Luke may be, might be, interested. But then I could see, last couple of years. Mitch, you just didn’t have a chance.”

“You could have said something to me.”

Pete straightened up a bit. “Mitch, I haven’t been a good brother to you. I’ve been a shit brother. I’ve been jealous of you since the first day I could remember. Always it was you. Anything that happened, it was my fault. Any extra love going around, you were the one to get it. Always, you were the golden boy, the one who could do no wrong, the one who was the athlete, the one who had the grades. Hell, Mitch, I practically hated you sometimes.”

“I never felt that.”

“You remember how we used to play around when we were kids. You remember that zip line we made together, how I fastened it to the tree out the back. Mitch, I did it on purpose. I wanted you to fall. I was trying to kill you.”

“I did fall.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t get that badly hurt.”

“Mitch, you were a mess. You were cut up from head to toe. And the hell I got for that!”

“I wouldn’t have ever thought—”

“Mitch, you just don’t get people. You don’t see what’s going on. I mean, you’ve got everything going for you — the face, the body, the grades.”

“Not my ....”

“Yeah. Well, I never knew about that.”

Mitchell took a deep breath. “Can I tell you some other stuff?”

“If you want to.”

Mitchell began by telling Pete about Robby Michaels, about how he had started the whole Jumbo thing. He told Pete about the letters he had got in his locker, and how he had thought it was Luke. He told him about what had happened with Mason, how Mason had heard him speaking to Luke and had tried to out him, and how Tadd had sorted it out. He told Pete about the problems he had been having at training, and about the day Marley had made him swim in his underwear.

“You were naked?”

“Yeah.”

“Mitch, you’ve got to be fucking joking. He had you there naked swimming laps?”

“Yeah.”

“Fucking hell!”

“And there were people in the bleachers.”

“Oh, Mitch. Fuck. You need to educate yourself. You can’t let someone do that to you. He should be reported. He can’t do that to a student.”

“No one seemed to think anything of it.”

“Yeah. Well it wasn’t happening to them. You think any of the other guys on the team would have put up with that?”

Mitchell tried to think, tried to imagine Marley doing it to one of the other guys. Slowly, he shook his head.

“You see?”

“He just doesn’t like me. I think he knows I’m gay. And he’s been calling me Jumbo.”

“What?”

Mitchell swallowed.

Pete stood up and turned around, as though he didn’t know what he was doing. He walked toward the door and walked back again. “Here, Mitch. Stand up,” he said.

Mitchell stood up and Pete lunged toward him, hugging him awkwardly and holding him tight. “I’m sorry,” he said. “For everything.”

Mitchell nodded and they parted.

 Pete sat on his bed again and there was silence for a moment.

“I’m not gay, Mitch, but I am — maybe a bit more up that end of the scale. So if you want to ... talk.”

“Have you been with a guy?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“When I was fourteen. You?”

“I’ve never been with anyone.”

Pete put his head in his hands and stared at the floor.

28

The following day at school it was calculus first up as usual. Mitchell knew now — since Saturday — that he had a thing for Tadd, something that was feeling stronger and stronger. He had found himself thinking of Tadd, lying in bed on Saturday night, and again on Sunday. Even so, he was afraid of Tadd, afraid of how big Tadd was, how strong he was, and of his popularity. Mitchell could never say anything to Tadd. If he did something like that and Tadd responded badly, then Mitchell didn’t know what would happen, but it couldn’t be good.

Mitchell had seen Tadd fight in his freshman year. Some guy had said something to Tadd (Mitchell didn’t know what it was) but Tadd had got up and started pummeling the guy, moving forward step by step and punching punch after punch, connecting with the guy’s head time and time again until he finally fell backwards. The guy had ended up in hospital and Tadd had been suspended. There had even been charges laid.

At the time, when he saw it, Mitchell had peed in his pants, a little burst of pee, because he was so close to what was happening and had been afraid. It was that, probably more than anything else, that made Mitchell pull away from Tadd when Tadd touched him. Tadd was simply frightening.

Even so, Mitchell sat in his regular place in class, supposing that if Tadd came in before someone else took the seat next to him, Tadd would sit there. And as it turned out, this was what happened. Tadd was late, but no one had taken the seat. Tadd apologized to Mrs Jerlow, but she didn’t say anything about it, just said, “Take a seat, Tadd.”

“How you doing?” Tadd said as he sat down and started pulling his books out of his pack.

Mitchell’s heart turned over and he could barely breathe. “Fine,” he said, though he had to say the word twice because the first attempt was inaudible.

“How’s the puppy going?”

“Good. Great.”

Tadd smiled a lopsided smile.

“Tadd,” Mrs Jerlow said, calling his attention to the front of the class.

Thereafter followed forty minutes of calculus, most of which Tadd seemed to be coping with. Mitchell hoped Tadd would ask if he could come around on Saturday again, though he didn’t suppose Tadd would. They had pretty well caught up — and anyway, Tadd had a new girlfriend. Mitchell reminded himself of this fact and told himself to stop thinking about Tadd like that. He could end up being beaten to a pulp. Why the hell would Tadd have a girlfriend if he was gay?

Then Mitchell remembered the Kinsey scale. He had had a look at it on the net, and had then done some hard thinking, trying to see if he really was one of the few people who were exclusively gay. What he found frightened him, because he did have a feeling for girls, if he let his mind run that way. There was something there, though as he felt it, Mitchell wanted to pull away from it. He didn’t suppose he ever wanted to get into bed with a girl — how could he? — though he had to admit to himself that there was some attraction there.

So what was Tadd like? Where did he fit in? Mitchell suddenly remembered what Tadd had said about finding it hard to get it up, and it was like a sudden revelation to Mitchell. Maybe it was simply that Tadd found it hard to get it up with a girl, because he had got a boner pretty quickly when Mitchell had been soaping his back in the showers, and then the following day he had whispered into Mitchell’s ear and said it wouldn’t be such a good idea for them to do it again.

Mitchell sat back in his chair, entirely forgetting about calculus. It was just like Pete had said. He was naive. He was missing all these signals from people. What else had Tadd done or said that might ...?

“Mitchell.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re off in a dream world.”

“Sorry,” Mitchell said, straightening up in his chair again, while at the same time he felt a new-found confidence.

29

That afternoon at training the relay trials went as well as they ever had. The meet was less than two weeks away, and some of the guys started to say they would be coming in in the mornings to do extra laps. Mitchell knew some of the guys trained with weights. He had tried it, but it was simply too much time out of his day, and really, he found it boring. He had plenty of strength for the size of his body. There wasn’t any point bulking out if he didn’t have the reflexes he needed. It was a matter of style — that was how Mitchell saw it. It was more about the way you swam than the power you had to pull yourself through the water.

Even so, Marley said that he had made two lanes available for the guys in the mornings, and he expected to see people take advantage of it. Mitchell supposed he would have to come in a couple of mornings, which meant taking a bus, as his father wouldn’t be ready for work at that time. Pete might drive him, or possibly even Jake, though it was a pretty big ask to get someone to wake up at six in the morning just so Mitchell could go somewhere he didn’t want to go anyway.

Marley collected all the guys together at the end of the session. He spoke about dedication and hard work and how they had to pull together. They were a team, all of them. They were representing the school. It sounded like bullshit to Mitchell, though he nodded his head along with the rest of them.

Mitchell walked slowly to the showers, letting the others walk ahead of him. He supposed he would end up in the corner showers with Tyler and Tadd. It was pretty well the accepted thing now, though as Mitchell thought about it he began to feel afraid. Standing so close to Tadd, right up against him, so that sometimes their bodies slipped against each other, and with Mitchell having a boner. Hell, he was falling in love with Tadd, and it was worse than it had been with Luke, far worse, because he didn’t understand Tadd at all. He supposed Tadd might, just maybe be more gay than straight, but what did that mean for Mitchell? Was he going to spend another few years throwing himself at a guy who just wasn’t interested?

When Mitchell opened his locker he jerked his head back at the sight of another note. Folded as usual, it had slipped down onto the side of his pack. Mitchell dried his hands on his towel and picked it up, glancing around to see if any of the other guys could see him. They were all in the showers already, Ben just rounding the corner.

I don’t think it’s
puppy
love. I think it could last a lifetime.

Mitchell felt his heart lurch in his chest. Puppy love! And “puppy” was underlined. It had to be Tadd. Mitchell hadn’t told anyone about the puppy apart from Luke, and Luke ... well, Mitchell knew it wasn’t Luke. Did Tadd really write this? It looked the same as the other notes, written with the same red marking pen and all spelled out in printing.

Mitchell folded the note and tried to think if Tadd had been behind the other guys when they had started training. Had he come out of the locker room last? Mitchell was pretty sure that he had. In fact, now that he thought about it, he was pretty sure that Tadd had often been the last one out of the locker room. Were they the days when he had posted the other notes? Mitchell didn’t know. It would only take a moment to slip the note into a locker, and Tadd might have done it while another guy was in the stalls — if it was Tadd.