Superhero (4 page)

“No, I’ll walk with you,” Owen insisted. “Come on. Let’s go out and wait for Emily’s mom.” He slung one arm around my shoulder and one around hers. Great.

It would have made too big a deal out of it to refuse, so I went along. We walked out to the big high school sign, me in my long Constantine-like trench coat and Owen in his letter jacket. I felt stupid.

Emily’s mom wasn’t there yet, and we waited in the cold. I wanted to give them some privacy, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it since there was really nothing around the sign except for parking lots. I wandered over and hopped up on the cement foot of the sign. I took out my iPod and messed around.

When I looked up, Owen was kissing Emily. They were front-to-front, hugging tight, and it was a serious, French kiss. Deep inside me there was a sharp pain that radiated outward and throbbed in my head and my heart.

Yeah, so I knew he was dating Emily and that we’d never be like that. That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt like a motherfucker.

I stared back down at my iPod, my eyes hot, until a car pulled up. I blinked furiously. I heard Emily yell, “Good night, Jordan!”

“Night!” I called out, not looking up. They drove off, and I hopped down and started walking toward my house, fast. I didn’t wait for Owen.

He caught up to me. “Man! Was that a great match or what?” He was bouncing on pure adrenaline like always after he wrestled. He jumped up and down on his toes.

“You did good,” I said tightly.

Owen grinned. “Hey, it means a lot to me that you and Emily get along, you know?”

I shrugged. I wouldn’t look at him.

“You do like her, right?” He put his arm around my shoulder. I scooted out from under it, not wanting him to touch me. But I pretended I just wanted to veer around a fire hydrant that was coming up.

“I’m glad you’re not dating Jennifer Conners or anyone like her.” It wasn’t the best answer, but it was all I had.

Jennifer was head cheerleader for the wrestling squad and a gorgeous bitch on wheels. The fact that Owen had ended up dating nerdy Emily Abrams and not someone like Jennifer had everyone in our school baffled. Well, maybe everyone but me.

“And?” Owen prompted, lightly punching my arm.

“And… you picked a good one, I guess.” I shrugged as if it didn’t matter, but it cost me. I was still feeling really hurt.

The fire hydrant was long gone, and I had no excuse to pull away when Owen came closer and put his arm around my shoulder. He pulled me in with a concerned look. “Hey, you know you’re my best friend, and you always will be, right?”

“That’s not the way it works, Owen. Someday, when you meet a girl you’re really crazy about, she’s going to expect to be your best friend.”

“Well, she won’t be. You will,” Owen insisted firmly, as if he just didn’t get it. “No girl is ever going to mean as much to me as you do, Jordan.”

As much as I knew that was a pipe dream, his words, and his arm around my shoulder, did make me feel better. The hurt in my chest loosened its grip and began to fade. I never could stay mad at him for long.

“You’re a dork,” I said.

“If I’m a dork, then you’re a bigger dork for being friends with me.”

“It doesn’t work that way. It’s not like people exude a dork ray or something. Well, sometimes you do, but I’m immune.”

“Oh, I see. You do know that you’re the king of dorks and that this conversation is absurd.”

“No,” I insisted. “It’s physically impossible to be both a dork and gay. It’s like saying you’re color blind
and
blind. The universe will only allow so much disadvantage in any one given life-form.”

Owen laughed. “You are so full of shit. You have been, and are, both a dork and gay, and frequently are in the same sentence.” He squeezed my shoulder but didn’t let go. He seemed content to walk like that all the way to my house. It was like he knew I needed him to show that he still cared about me.

I was too tall to do it anymore, but so what. I leaned my head down against his shoulder. I’d deal with the crooked neck later.

“Whatever,” I said, the final thrust in any argument.

Owen seemed to understand and stopped talking.

Jordan

T
HE
second week of our junior year, the principal called an emergency assembly the period before lunch. Rumors had been flying around, so I had a feeling I knew what this was about.

Owen and I always met at my locker between classes and for lunch—mainly because there were too many people who bothered him at his locker. He was waiting for me there, and we walked to the gym together.

“Think this is about Raymond Toleman?” he asked me, his face grim.

“Probably. I wonder if they’ll tell us what happened.”

The rumor was that a senior, Raymond Toleman, had been found dead in his room by his mother yesterday morning. He’d hung himself.

“Did you know him?” I asked Owen.

He shook his head. “Not really.” But there was something up. He had a tight jaw and a little crease on his forehead—he had that look when something was really bothering him.

“I’m sensing a subplot here,” I said.

He shook his head a little. “He came to a lot of the wrestling matches and some of the guys gave him a hard time, that’s all.”

I remembered seeing Raymond at the wrestling matches. He always sat in the first bleacher, close to the team, but I’d never paid much attention. Raymond was the kind of kid who was born with a “kick me” sign pasted on the back of his shirt by life. He was small, stuttered badly, had greasy hair and glasses about two inches thick. I’d never seen him in anything but the same plaid shirt and brown pants. I guess he had some kind of learning disability or something. I didn’t know much about him.

The gym was pretty crowded when we got there. Owen and I grabbed a couple of the chairs they’d put in the middle of the gym floor. Emily waved to us from the bleachers, and we waved back.

Owen was right; the assembly was about Raymond Toleman. Principal Meyers looked pissed as he gave all six hundred of us kids a chunk of his cerebral cortex. It seemed things were pretty bad for Raymond. A bunch of kids had befriended him on Facebook and then posted crap on his page. His money was routinely “borrowed” and his locker trashed. He was shoved, insulted, and harassed. The incident that had apparently been the last straw for old Ray was when some football players had shoved him into a puddle the week before near the football field—and held him down. He liked to sit on the bleachers and watch practice. Apparently the football players considered being watched by some poor lonely kid a personal insult. No one would admit which of the football players had done it, so the entire team was being put on three-day suspension. Two days after the puddle incident, Raymond Toleman killed himself.

Principal Meyers didn’t pull any punches, and by the time he was done, I think everyone in the auditorium, at least everyone who was not a total dickhead, felt sorry and ashamed. I did, and I didn’t even know the kid. Owen was sitting there, his hands clenched in his lap and his face bright red. I could almost feel the heat radiating off him. He was seriously tweaked. I wanted to pat his shoulder or something, but that wasn’t a great idea in the middle of assembly, even if some of the girls were crying on each other’s shoulders. I gave him a shoulder bump instead. He tried to give me a smile, but it was about as convincing as cat whiskers on a dog.

Meyers gave us a come-to-Jesus speech about Jefferson being the kind of high school we could be proud of, about looking out for one another and showing kindness and humility and all of that. Then Mrs. Fishbinder came up and announced a new zero-tolerance policy for bullying and the formation of an anti-bullying club. The adults were taking this really seriously, and I was glad. Sometimes the crap you saw in the halls made you want to puke. I’d never been subjected to a lot of it myself because of Owen, but I’d seen it. Too bad it was too late for Raymond Toleman.

As we filed out for lunch, I tried to get Owen to talk to me.

“What’s up, Pin Man?” I bumped his shoulder.

Owen looked around and then tilted his head. We went out the front door, and he didn’t say anything, just headed for his truck.

Owen and I had both gotten our driver’s licenses over the summer. His dad had gotten him a used Chevy pickup. It had over a hundred thousand miles on it, and it wasn’t pretty, but Owen loved that truck. We both climbed in. I leaned back against the door and waited for him to talk. His face was still red, and he looked really upset.

“Do you know who pushed Raymond in that puddle?” I guessed.

He shook his head. “No, but it could just as easily have been our guys.” I knew he meant the wrestlers. “Some of the guys got pretty rude with Ray—knocking off his glasses, pushing him on the bleachers, calling him faggot, stuff like that.”

I felt a little nauseous. He glanced at me guiltily.

“He wasn’t gay. I guess. He was just… poor kid probably couldn’t have thrown a ball to save his life, and he loved sports. He would cheer louder than anyone, even though the guys were such assholes to him.”

“But not you, though, right?” It was more of a statement. I’d never seen Owen be mean to anyone.

“No. But I didn’t stop it.” His voice was rough with emotion. He cleared his throat and stared out the windshield.

I put my hand on his arm, not knowing what else to do.

“I should have stopped it,” he said firmly.

I didn’t say anything.

“I mean, why didn’t I? I thought it, thought they should leave him alone, but I didn’t actually open my mouth and put it out there. It makes me fucking ashamed, ashamed to be a jock.”

Owen almost never cursed, so I knew he was really upset. I tried to lighten the mood. “Yeah, I’ve always been ashamed about being such a jock myself.”

“Shut up,” he said without venom. “If anyone had been nice to that kid, if anyone had bothered to stick up for him, he might not have felt like he had to… God! How could someone even stand to do that?”

I wondered myself, and I wondered how long it had taken and what he’d been thinking when he did it. But that was just morbid and now was probably not the right moment to bring it up.

Owen took stuff so personally sometimes. For being such a tough guy in the ring, Owen could be surprisingly sensitive outside it. I mean, I felt really bad for Raymond, too, but Owen was taking it hard. Then again, he’d seen Raymond being bullied firsthand. I knew it wasn’t easy to step in on something like that, tell your teammates to shut the fuck up. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have done it either.

“You have a lot of clout in this school, Pin Man. So you didn’t help Raymond. None of us did, and that’s a big stinking pile of monkey shit. But you can help the next kid. Just be true to yourself, dude.”

Owen put on his serious frown. “I’m going to get involved with that anti-bullying whatever.”

“Yeah? You want company?”

“Always.” He held up a fist for me to bump. If we were home I’d have knocked it aside and hugged him. Owen needed a big ol’ honking hug. But we were in the school parking lot so I did the macho thing and bumped it.

“Emily’s going to be wondering where we are,” I said.

“Yeah. We’d better go in.”

I
N
THE
cafeteria they had a table set up for the anti-bullying club. Owen went over while I told Emily what was going on. We ended up spending most of lunch at that table. They had flyers to order anti-bullying T-shirts, hats, brochures with tips on how to stop bullying, and a sign-up sheet. They were going to meet once a week. Owen and I signed up. The girl at the table was beside herself with excitement to have Owen Nelson interested. After about ten minutes she asked if he’d consider being an officer, and he said sure. Funnily enough, she didn’t ask me.

I noticed some of the wrestlers and football players eyeing Owen at the table and not looking too thrilled about it. I almost flipped them off then remembered that I’m, like, twenty pounds shy of the right to be cocky. I kept my finger to myself.

As I watched Owen dedicate himself to that cause so seriously, I started to feel all warm and melty. I’d known him for nine years, and I still sometimes forgot what a big heart he had. My own flipped over in my chest, and I guess I must have been staring at him with absolutely no filter, because when I turned my head, I saw Emily. She was watching me with this sad, pitying expression.

Damn. My face burned with a wave of mortification.

I told Owen I’d see him later and went back to my locker. I switched my books and ditched into a restroom on the second floor. It was empty, what with everyone still being at lunch and all. I went into one of the stalls and sat down, putting my face in my hands. They were shaking.

That look on Emily’s face…. In her face I saw what I’d never fully admitted to myself—the humiliatingly pathetic hopelessness of my love.

O
N
H
ALLOWEEN
Owen came over, and we watched a couple of old Hammer movies starring Christopher Lee. Owen was usually on a strict training diet that consisted of eggs and protein powder and semitrucks full of broiled chicken and green beans—basically, nothing remotely yummy. But wrestling season didn’t start until Thanksgiving and I managed to tempt him with a bowl of chocolate ice cream with marshmallow topping. I was his best friend; that was my job. My parents were out at a Halloween party, so we had the place to ourselves. Owen had this goofy werewolf mask he liked to put on when he answered the door for trick-or-treaters. The screams that wafted into the living room? Priceless.

There was something I wanted to talk to him about, but I didn’t work up my nerve until we were Hammered out and had gone to bed.

“Hey, Owen.”

“Hey, what?”

“Um… I’ve decided something. I’m going to come out at school.”

Owen rolled over to face me. “Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow, Jordan. That’s… a big deal.”

“I mean, it’s probably not going to be the news of the century. It’s not like I’ve ever dated a girl in my entire life. But I wanted to make sure you’re okay with it. Everyone knows you’re my friend.”