The Love Series Complete Box Set (160 page)

We laughed through the rest of dinner, sharing horror stories about our coaches and laughing about some of the stuff that went down that day. For the first time in so long, it felt cathartic to be with friends and not have to worry about anything.

However, stepping into the weight room a few hours later brought the worry back in full force. Determined to prove my father wrong, and maybe finally shut him the fuck up, I grabbed a pre-printed workout routine from Coach, and then Eric, Scott, Dylan, and I hit the circuit. After forty-five minutes, our arms and legs were shaking and we were covered in sweat.

I tossed Dylan a bottle of water and sat next to him on the bench where he was sitting, his head in his hands wiping away the sweat with a towel. “Hey, man, you okay?”

He didn’t say anything at first, swigging back most of his water in one huge gulp. He made another pass with the towel across his face before finally looking over to me. When he did, it was as if he was seeing me for the first time, as if I hadn’t been in the same room as him for the last hour. “Yeah, I’m good.” He stood from the bench quickly, again without even looking at me. When he got to the door, he turned around, an almost sad look on his face. “Must’ve ate something funky at dinner or maybe I’m just shot from the long-ass day. I’m gonna head back to the room.”

When he walked away, I knew that something else was bothering him, but I was in the zone and needed to get in another round on the circuit before I could call it quits.

Standing at the head of the bench, I spotted Eric on his second round of bench-presses. “He okay?” Scott asked from the other side of the bench, tipping his head at the doors through which Dylan had just left.

I shrugged before helping Eric place the bar back in its holder. “Yeah, I guess. Just tired probably.”

“No, I mean like . . .” Scott’s words fell silent as Eric stood from the bench.

Eric shot him a glare and gritted out, “Dude,” as a way to silence whatever Scott was just about to say.

I stood back, watching the entire exchange pass in the blink of an eye, not really sure what to make of it. “What do you mean?” I folded my arms across my chest, my voice taking on a defensive tone.

“Nothing. He meant nothing, right, Scott?” Eric shot him another look as he twisted open a bottle of water.

Scott straightened his back, took a deep breath, and puffed out a “whatever,” before facing me. “Is he,” rather than using his words to complete the sentence, he flipped his hand back and forth, “you know? A fag?”

I’d like to think there wasn’t anger or hatred in the way he spat out the word “fag,” but then I’d be lying. I’d also like to say that my world didn’t spin a little, threatening to swallow me whole as the word tumbled out either, but then again, I’d be lying once more.

Scott, a kid who I’d known less than twenty-four hours, had put a voice to what I’d always thought about my best friend, but could never say myself.

He’d also put a voice to my own darkest secret—one which would never see the light of day.

Knowing there was no way I could let them think that, or let them see my faltering, I recovered quickly and tossed my sweaty towel in his face. “No way in hell. I’ve known Dylan my whole life. Don’t you think I’d know if he was queer?” A feeling of betrayal punched me in the gut at calling him a queer, even if it was only intended to defend and protect him.

It still makes you a coward.

“No need to get your sac all twisted. I was just curious.” Scott punched me jokingly on the arm, and all I could think about was whether I’d been convincing enough.

Twenty minutes later, when we were all done with our workout, the three of us trekked across the campus to our dorms, more than exhausted and in desperate need of a shower. When I got back to my room, Dylan wasn’t there, but it was clear he had been. Shrugging off the unease from the early conversation, or accusation depending on how you looked at it, I showered quickly, not wanting to focus on the possibility of Dylan being gay.

Or the reality of me being gay.

Chapter Three

August 7, 2006

After being at the camp for a week, I wasn’t so sure I’d made the best choice. Rather than giving me the time to think and clear my head, all being there had done was confused the fuck out of me. Reading over the words I’d written in my journal over the seven days didn’t help at all. At home, it was different. No one looked at me differently. I was just Dylan Hopkins; there was nothing more to me. Maybe that was because I was never without Shane and Reid—maybe they took the focus off me.

But here, I felt like there was a sign over my head in rainbow-colored letters flashing “homo” wherever I went. I was pretty sure Scott caught me staring at Shane in the weight room the other night. He glared at me sideways and whispered something under his breath to Eric who immediately looked my way.

It became nearly impossible to be around everyone in the weight room and even more so after we worked out. My brain was turning into a jumbled mess and I had no clue how to un-mess it. So while everyone was out doing whatever it was that they did after we were free for the day, I pulled out my journal and tried to clear my head.

Most nights, I wrote until my hand felt like it was going to fall off, but tonight, Shane came barreling through door, laughing like a fool.

Before he could see it, I slid my journal in-between the mattress and box spring and sat up straight against the wall. “You gotta come down to the lake,” Shane puffed out, trying to catch his breath.

“Why?” I kicked my legs over the side of the bed and slid my feet into my Nike sandals, ready to go in an instant, despite the skepticism in my voice.

I grabbed my key from the desk and pulled it over my neck, letting in fall down my back in-between my shoulder blades. The humid summer air that was usually unbearable during the day was marginally better. As we walked closer to the lake, the air grew a bit cooler. The moonlight shimmered across the lake as a loon called out in the distance. In the shadows, I could see a bunch of the guys huddled together under a tree, the bright glare of what I assumed was a computer screen lighting their faces up in the glow.

“What the hell?” I kept the words to a low mumble, one hopefully only I heard. The moans I thought I heard from a few feet back were now growing louder and louder as we approached the group.

It seemed as if no one even noticed us as we sat down. They were obviously glued to the screen where the girl on girl porn was playing. “Eric swiped it from his older brother,” Shane said by way of explanation.

You could have heard a pin drop. Except for the noises coming from the computer, no one spoke. I watched on and tried my best to appear interested; though I’m pretty sure no one was paying attention to me.

Shit, if I thought my head was fucked up before this, it was even more so now. In the back of my brain, the part that was always trying to maintain the perfect cover for who I knew I really was, I couldn’t help but think this was all some kind of game. Perhaps a trick that Eric and Scott were trying to play on me after our stilted exchange of glares in the weight room the other day.

Rather than getting too ahead of myself, I sat there calmly and tried not to get too worried about being outed. Besides what did they have as proof?

You checking out another guy. That’s what they’ve got against you.

The laptop lid slamming shut shook me out of my worry. “Dude, that was fucking hot. You have to get more of those,” Ryan, one of Scott and Eric’s friends from their hometown team said as he not-so-casually grabbed at his crotch, disguising it as readjusting himself.

Without saying anything, Scott looked over his shoulder at me, his face half-hidden, half-lit by the moon. “Hot, right, Dylan?” Insinuation was thick in his words.

I didn’t think the other guys heard the accusation in what he’d just said, or the sneer in his tone, but I did. “Hell yeah, it was,” I spat out quickly, with what was hopefully not too much eagerness to seem unconvincing.

“All right, boys. It’s been real, but I’m being eaten alive out here. Damn mosquitos.” Eric swatted away an imaginary bug before adding, “I’m heading back to the room.”

Snorting through his laughter, Scott stood next to him. “Bugs, my ass. You just want to go jerk off in the shower before I get back to the room.”

“How about I race you back to the dorm and whoever gets there first gets the shower for as long as they need while the other one has to wait in the hallway?” Without even giving him a beat to react, Scott sprinted toward the dorms, leaving Eric more than a few steps behind while the rest of us stood there laughing at them.

“And that is why I’m happy to be in a single this year.” Ryan clapped his hand to my shoulder, setting me on edge even more than I had already been. “See you in the morning,” he said as he strode away from us.

The awkward silence that descended upon Shane and me as we stood there alone was crippling—at least for me.

Wordlessly, we walked back to our room. After tossing my key on the desk, I flopped back into my bed and stared up at the ceiling. “You can have the bathroom first. I’m gonna go call Reid. Check up on him.” Shane’s words clogged in his throat with some kind of unnamed emotion, one which I chose to ignore.

Shane slipped back out the door so quickly, I didn’t have any time to respond, not that I would have known what to say. Reaching for my journal, I pulled the pen out from the spiraled wire, my words flowing with more clarity than my brain was capable of.

I don’t think most people can pinpoint the actual moment they discover who they are. I mean, you hear stories all the time about people wasting their life trying to figure out their purpose, trying to figure out who they are and what they’re meant to be. I’m not going to pretend that I know all of the answers—that’d be a huge fucking lie, but I do know more about myself now than I did an hour ago.

I guess I’ve always known I was different somehow, but I just wrote it off with a million different excuses. Maybe I’m different because my parents are still happily married or because I’m an only child.

But when those excuses run out and you start thinking that you’re different because there’s something inherently ‘wrong’ with you, that’s when it gets complicated. Yeah, I know they say—whoever the hell ‘they’ are—that growing up isn’t easy, that being a sixteen-year-old boy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, but I’ve known for maybe longer than I care to admit that whatever is making my life difficult, whatever is screwing me up in my head is much more than normal teenage shit.

Watching what I watched tonight only confirmed what I’ve known for probably my whole life.

I’m gay.

The door slamming shut scared the shit out of me and I quickly tossed my journal under my pillow, my heart pounding like crazy in my chest. Shane didn’t notice as he crashed his phone down on the desk angrily.

“Everything okay?” I asked as I tossed back the covers.

His fists were clenched at his side; the anger vibrated off him, filling the room with a palpable tension. “What the fuck do you think?” he roared, punching the door with rage.

I jumped off my bed as he clutched his right hand and winced in pain. “What the hell did you do that for? You’ll break your throwing hand, asshole.”

“I don’t fucking care, anymore.” Some of the bite left him, and he calmed marginally. He slinked down onto his bed, hanging his head in his hands. “It’s so fucking unfair,” he gritted, stifling back his rising emotions.

I sat next to him, far enough away to leave him some space, but close enough to let him know I was listening. “What happened? Is it Reid?”

He punched the bed with his good hand—at least both wouldn’t be broken. “No, it’s my fucking asshole father. Reid came home late the other night and dear-old-dad knocked him around a bit,” he snidely remarked as he stood from the bed, pacing the room like a caged animal. “I don’t know what the fuck to do. He’s getting out of control. At first, he would just yell at Mom. Then he would just lash out at me, smack me around a little, but now, this. Reid says he can barely open his eye; it’s so swollen.” He flopped into the chair at the desk and looked at his hand as it turned purple and swelled.

“You need to put ice on that. Let me go get it so Coach doesn’t see you.” I moved to the door as he muttered, “thanks” before I left.

In the two minutes it took me to walk down to the water cooler to grab a bag of ice, I tried to make sense of what made it okay for a father to beat his own son, but it turned out that two minutes wasn’t enough time.

I twisted the knob to our door and saw Shane sitting on my bed, my journal open and in his hands.

He looked up at me as if I was some kind of intruder, or as if he was seeing me for the first time. Considering what I was sure he’d just read, that was certainly true. “What are you doing?” Shock colored my words as I tore the spiral notebook from his bruised hand.