The Battle for Jericho (5 page)

“Thanks,” I said, suddenly embarrassed. I tucked the phone deep in my own pocket and hung the mask around my neck. I’d have to slip the mask back into Steve’s locker tomorrow.

Dylan sat down on the sofa again, clutching his mug in both hands as if to warm them. He seemed relaxed now, and he stared at the floor, drifting off into his thoughts.

“That’s a nice painting,” I said, pointing at the rendering of Saturn.

His eyes shifted to me, but his attention was still elsewhere. “Thanks,” he said. “I love space. I wanted to be an astrophysicist, but I’m lousy in math.”

“And I like that you keep everything so open.” I gestured at the room, still trying to draw him back from his inward turn. “My folks have so much stuff that you can barely turn around in our house without knocking something over.”

He whiffed out a soft, wistful laugh. “Oh, there was a bunch of stuff around here too, until my boyfriend moved out. A lot of the paintings and bric-a-brac were his.”

“Oh.” That was so not where I wanted to go. I looked down at the coffee table and saw blank geometric shapes in the thin layer of dust where objects had once been. It was a sad sight.

“He couldn’t take it,” Dylan continued, his eyes growing distant and regretful. “Ron’s a great guy. He was committed to the cause and to our relationship. Or so I thought. The picketing, the tire slashing, the death threats… it was too much for him. The day you broke in, I was going to make a special dinner to cheer him up, but he didn’t come home.”

The dude’s heart was breaking all over again, right in front of me. He seemed so alone, so hurt. And I, in my brainlessness, had contributed to his pain. I stared at him, and I felt this weird rush of heat flash through my body so strongly that, for a moment, I couldn’t breathe.

I had to help him.

I had to make things better.

“Dylan,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“I’m… going gay.”

Uh. Did that actually come out of
my
mouth?

Chapter 5

L
ISSANDRA
A
CKERMAN
is crazy tall for a girl, only two inches shy of six feet. She doesn’t like most sports, but she jogs every day at dawn with her mom, even in winter. She has cocoa-colored skin and black hair so naturally curly it forms a little cloud around her head. She’s lean, but she’s round in all the right places, and she’s very pretty.

Most importantly, she likes me.

She lives in an unincorporated subdivision south of Webster’s Glen. It teeters on the edge of a small, unnamed lake that her father fishes in just about year-round. She and I met last year in freshman English. The minute I walked into that classroom and laid eyes on her, I fell in love. I’d been in love before, lots of times, but it was always one-sided. The girls I tended to fall in love with on sight were all beauties, and they wanted guys who were just as attractive as they were. I’m not decayed zombie material, but I don’t exactly turn female heads when I walk by, either. (Bulging muscles would help, but those things are not so easy to come by.) Lissandra was the first, and only, girl who showed any interest in me.

Of course, that just made me love her even more.

When I met her, she was living under this rule her folks set forth, forbidding her to date until she turned sixteen. We counted down the days to that magic birthday, May 21st. Along the way, we met every morning in the cafeteria before homeroom, sharing pints of orange juice and talking our heads off. We kissed in the stairwells between classes. We held hands when we walked along the halls together and sometimes, hidden away in an empty janitor’s closet, our hands explored uncharted territory.

Ahhh.

On the evening of May 21st, I took her out to celebrate her birthday. Dad drove me over to pick her up, and then he dropped us off at the mall. I don’t have a driver’s license. Damn it. And at the rate Dad’s giving me driving lessons, I won’t get one until I’m forty. Damn it, damn it. Once, just
once
mind you, my foot slipped off the brake onto the gas pedal, and Dad’s vintage black Mustang roared through the red light of a busy intersection. Oh, there was lots of screeching of tires and such, and one lady hit her brakes so hard it popped her airbag and sent her wig flying out the window, but we didn’t so much as scratch another vehicle. No big deal, right? Yet Dad cusses at me every time I get behind the wheel now. Which isn’t all that often.

Lissandra, a sci-fi buff (another reason I love her), chose to see the latest
Star Trek
movie. We shared nachos and a giant Coke and snuggled in the magic dark of that theater. Afterward, we rode the mall’s carousel and kissed. Then I took her to the food court for barbecue pizza and more Coke and more kisses. When I escorted her to her door, at nine on the dot as I’d promised her parents, I kissed her deeply even with my dad sitting behind us in his car. It was a perfect first date. We’ve had many wonderful dates since.

I remembered all this in the first ten seconds after I uttered those three deadly words in Dylan’s living room. My entire heterosexual life flashed before my eyes.

Dylan knew bullcrap when he heard it. “I think that’s the one-tenth percent of alcohol in the peppermint flavor talking there,” he said. He glanced at the mug in my hand, as if wondering whether I’d had enough coffee too.

“No, I’m serious,” I insisted.

“It’s okay. You’re off the hook, at least as far as I’m concerned. You don’t owe me anything.”

“I want to be a part of the cause. I want to fight straight society.” Where the hell was this coming from?

Dylan put down his mug and stood up. He reached over and plucked the mug from my hand. “Jericho, you don’t know what you’re saying. Okay, let’s say that I believe somebody who just committed a gay-bashing is actually ready to come out as gay himself.” He paused, as if parsing that last sentence in his own head. “Actually, that’s not such a farfetched idea. It’s happened before. In any event, coming out is one of the most drastic steps a person can take—”

“I’m ready.”
Somebody slap me. Please!
“What makes you think I’m not serious?”

“Thirty minutes ago you were hysterical. You’re full of guilt.”

“I know what I’m doing.” No, I didn’t. Seriously, I didn’t.

“If you do this, you could lose your friends. Your relationship with your parents may never be the same. My father disowned me when I came out. And later on, you could face job discrimination—”

“I could face job discrimination regardless,” I replied, pointing at my dark brown face and short, kinky Afro. Then a shudder ripped through my body from head to toe as an even graver thought struck me:
I’d have to give up girls.
Just the idea of it made me want to cry again. I could feel my eyes beginning to water. Damn it.

“You’re scared to death,” Dylan said. “I see that all over your face. This is not something you have to rush into now—”

“Yes, it is. I have to do this. It’s the only way.”

“Jericho, don’t do something rash that you’ll regret later.”

I’d already done something rash that I regretted later. And I was going to pay for it, somehow. What better way to make up for beating down a gay man than to become gay myself? That would be karma, kismet, and poetic justice, all rolled up into one. “No, I’m ready. I’m ready to make the switch from straight to gay.”

Dylan frowned. Suddenly, he looked confused. “Wait…
what
?”

I felt a moment of frustration. What part of this was so hard for him to wrap his brain around? “I’m joining up, Dylan. I’m jumping on the gay train.”

“You think people choose…?” Dylan stopped talking and just looked at me. I could tell he still didn’t believe a word I’d said. In fact, it wasn’t just disbelief I saw in his face now. He was staring at me as if I’d said something outrageous, as if I’d told him there was a paisley Pop-Tart sticking out of his head and I wanted a bite of it.

“I’m ready to do my bit for the gay cause,” I repeated, dropping my voice an octave as if that would make me more convincing.

Dylan took my arm and pulled me to my feet. Another tingle went through me, making me tremble slightly. “Tell you what,” he said as he escorted me to the door. “Go home and sleep on it. I go back to work tomorrow, but I should be home by five. If by then you still think you want to tell the world you’re gay, come back and we’ll talk.”

I started to protest—actually, I started to grab the doorjamb to stop the eviction—but suddenly I was standing outside on his porch, listening to the deadbolt click behind me.

M
ONDAY
was a weird day for me. It helped that Lissandra didn’t make it to school. I knew, having spoken with her Sunday night, that she was still suffering from a head cold, which had come down on her three days ago, and her mom was keeping her home. There was no morning or in-between-class kiss to distract me. But in her absence, I found myself staring at just about every girl I passed. I couldn’t get enough of breasts. Mrs. Rockmond, my forty-something geometry teacher, even caught my eyes lingering inappropriately on her chest during her lecture that morning. She was so uncomfortable—and offended—that she sent me down to the office of the curvaceous, thirty-something vice principal, Mrs. Carter, where I spent the rest of the period sneaking glances at
her
knockers.

“What’s the matter with you?” Mac asked me as he, Hutch, and I made our way through the line in the cafeteria to get our lunch. He had reached out to get a carton of milk while my hand was also in the cooler. His finger accidentally grazed my wrist, and I jerked my hand back so frantically I sent the carton of apple juice I’d just grabbed hurtling like a fly ball. Luckily, Hutch managed to nab it before it smacked into anyone’s head.

I mumbled something in reply to Mac’s question—even I don’t know what I said—then took my tray and marched off to find a table by myself. Of course, Mac and Hutch followed. Hutch sat across from me, babbling on about the new video game his dad had gotten him Saturday. Ordinarily, I’d have been trying to make arrangements to play that sucker with him—it was a game I wanted myself and probably wouldn’t get until Christmas—but all I could think about was how
close
his knees were to mine under the table. Mac sat right next to me, and his right thigh was practically touching my left.

I slid down the bench from them and drew in my arms and legs, turtle-like.

Hutch and Mac looked at each other, and then they looked at me. “Are you all right, man?” Hutch asked.

“I think I’m coming down with something,” I muttered. For effect, I sniffled and then hacked out a little cough.

Later, in PE, after forty-five minutes of calisthenics, I didn’t want to get in the shower—something I’d done without a second thought since my first PE session in seventh grade.

“Jericho, I can’t let you go to your next class without a shower,” Coach Gabe snapped as I stubbornly tried to pull my jeans on over my sweats. “You’ll stink up the room and then your teacher will come complaining to me.”

“I’m cool, Coach,” I said. “I used the heavy-duty deodorant before I left home this morning.”

Coach wasn’t having it. He jabbed a finger at the showers. “Get your funky behind in there before I throw you in, clothes and all.”

By that time, the other guys had finished their scrub-downs and were getting dressed at their lockers. I stripped down, wrapped myself like a mummy from chest to knees in bath towels, and scurried past them, eyes on the floor.

Mac was concerned. After school, at my hall locker, as I was unloading the books from my backpack that I wouldn’t need again until the next day, Mac came up to me. “Is there something you want to talk about, man?”

I feigned an air of nonchalance, avoiding his eyes. He had some really nice eyes. So did Hutch. “Nah.”

“Everything okay at home?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m cool, Mac. I’m cool.”

He wasn’t convinced. Damn it. What happened to my credibility? Right now, it didn’t seem as if I could even sell him on the idea that we were standing on a little planet called Earth. “You’ve been… weird, Jerry. All day.”

“What’re you talking about? There’s nothing weird about me, man.” And in my haste to get away from him, I slammed the locker door on my hand. “Jesus!” Make no mistake.
That
was an expletive. I did a little pain dance, hopping from one foot to the other and then spinning around.

“Let me look at that.” Mac tried to take my injured hand.

“Don’t touch it!” I jerked my hand away from him, elbowing a passing girl hard in the ribs. She yelped and dropped her backpack.

“Oh man. I’m sorry,” I said, reaching out to retrieve her backpack.

“No you’re not,” the girl snarled. As I bent down, she brought her knee up, delivering a solid blow to my chin that made my teeth click. I fell back into my open locker.

“
Now
you’re sorry,” the girl said.

Mac moved quickly between us, shielding me. “Step away, Wonder Woman.”

The girl scooped up her backpack and strode off down the hall, cursing under her breath. I watched her go. Her jeans were tight. She had a phenomenal butt.