Tips on Having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend (14 page)

My mom’s up and humming, shuffling around the kitchen when I get home.

“Good ride, honey?” she asks, hugging me hello.

She smells like coffee. I used to love coffee before I had to give it up. Coffee and gum are my addictions. Now I’m a Postum and Tic Tacs girl.

My mom puts my favorite mug, a Halloween ghost mug, into the microwave and presses the minute button and says, “I made your Postum for you.”

I slide into a chair, stretch out my legs, flexing my feet to loosen up the aching muscles. “That’s sweet.”

“You want any toast?”

“Yeah,” I start getting up, but my mom puts out her hand.

“I’ll do it. This morning how about I pamper you?”

I smile at her and knead my calves. “Okay.”

She makes my toast and pulls my Postum out of the microwave.

She starts singing, the wrong lyrics, of course, like she always does. It’s this old Led Zeppelin song, “
Stairway to Heaven
.”

“There’s a feeling I get when I look at my waist,” she sings as she stirs.

“Mom,” I say and roll my eyes. “It goes, ‘There’s a feeling I get when I look to the west.’”

“Oh,” she laughs and smiles and runs her free hand through her hair.

She doesn’t have much hair. It’s thin and dyed red and floaty. It’s old woman hair really. My mom had me when she was twenty-two, which makes her . . . what? Thirty-nine? She’s a bit plump, but she has dimples when she smiles and when she laughs and she likes to laugh. She worked so hard for so long doing the kind of job that would kill anybody’s soul, but a couple years ago she got a new job at the hospital. Before, she was the receptionist at this dental supply company. She worked by this cabinet where they have rows and rows of pretend teeth, all different sizes, all different shades from super-star white to tobacco yellow. They use them for caps and dentures. When I was little, I’d have nightmares about those teeth coming after me in the dark, attached to jaws of course, and chomping, chomping, chomping away.

I shiver and just then my mom hands me my peanut butter and honey toast along with my Postum.

“Thanks,” I say while she kisses the top of my head.

“You betcha.”

She walks over to the counter, sips her coffee, stares at me, and I brace myself for the Mom Moment, the moment when my mother tries to be the kind of mom you see on sitcoms and old tv shows, the Uber-Mater, Herr Reitz would call it, the super mom.

“Is everything okay with you, sweetie?” she asks.

“Yep,” I lie, take a bite of toast.

“No seizures lately?”

“Nope.”

“Good, I’d hate for you to have to go on that medicine again.”

Before they knew what caused my seizures, Dr. Dulli put me on medicine. He tried a million kinds, but something always went wrong. My blood would get toxic, I’d hallucinate. I’d be allergic. Seizure medicine works great for some people, but not for me. That’s why we had to try so hard to figure out what was causing them, the seizures.

I shudder, thinking about it. The sweet honey on my toast coats my tongue. All those rashes, all that sickness, Dylan was there for me the whole time.

My mom sips her coffee, creating a calculating silence while I try to hurry down my food so that I can escape to the shower.

“Dylan hasn’t called the last couple days,” she says.

I shrug.

“Things okay with you two?”

Postum solidifies in my stomach making a good globby pit. I stand up and rush the words out, “We broke up. It’s no big deal. I’m okay.”

“Oh, honey—”

My mom’s arms reach out to me but I’m already gone, past her and fleeing to the shower where no one asks me questions, where no one looks at me with pity eyes.

Mr. Raines, our lovely principal, announces on the intercom that the Boys’ Varsity Soccer Team “stomped on Trinity” yesterday afternoon.

Emily snarfs. “Sounds like they took out the father, son, and Holy Ghost.”

I’m laughing with her, walking down the hall to first period, when I see him. I see Dylan. Everything stops. My heart stops. My feet stop. My soul stops. Even Emily stops and says, “Uh-oh” beneath her breath, real quiet.

Dylan lifts his hand cautiously. His fingers wiggle a bit in a tiny wave.

“Hi, guys,” he says.

“Hi,” I say. I scan him. He does not look too depressed, but how does a depressed person look. I have no clue. I say it again, all awkward and stupid, like I’ve never seen him naked or held his hand or seen him cry, “Hi.”

“Hhmm,” is all that comes out of Emily’s mouth and I can tell by her tensed-up back and the way that she’s clutching her books that she’s trying to vaporize Dylan with her kitty-cat eyes.

“Belle, I wanted to tell you . . . about Bob . . .” he starts to say. His hands flap around in the air like they’re trying to pull the right words out.

Emily grabs me by the elbow, steers me by this golden boy, this sad-eye boy who used to hold me in his arms. She says, “We’ll be late for class.”

“Yeah, right,” Dylan nods. He looks at me. “I’ll talk to you later.”

I don’t say anything. I can’t say anything. My heart has gone so big, so haywire that it thumps everywhere in my body. It’s taken control of all of me, just thump thumping away. It’s all I can hear.

Thump. Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

Finally Emily’s voice breaks through as she does a speed-walk hustle through the hallway, “Really, what freaking nerve. Who does he think he is? What a scum bag. He didn’t even say anything about you passing out in the cafeteria yesterday, I mean, everybody in the whole school knows about it and he can’t even act concerned. Jesus, I can’t believe you ever went out with him.”

Thump.

Thump. Thump.

Blah. Blah. Blah.

Emily’s words are nothing words. All I can think about is Dylan and his gold, gold soul and the way his fingers used to feel against my skin when he touched me.

I turn around and look for him in the hall, but my Dylan has disappeared. Another boy, still golden, stands still as people part around him. He lifts up his hand and waves goodbye.

Em stands next to me, camera in front of her like a gun, she clicks a picture of the hall with the new Dylan in it.

She checks the picture on the viewfinder and shows me, “That’s a good one. High school hall. Devoid of meaning.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Right.”

Then I remember what Tom’s dad said and I rush down the hall, back toward Dylan, leaving Em standing there with her camera, probably taking a picture of me. I rush past Shawn, Mimi Cote in a stupid metal Mimi-skirt, Eddie Caron. I get to Dylan, watch his shocked, sad eyes and I gush out my words, “You have to be careful, Dylan. It’s a small town. Tom’s dad said that people might come after you. He wanted me to warn you.”

Dylan stares at me. “Tom’s dad?”

His mouth is a straight line.

He shakes his head and says, “I’ll be fine, Belle.”

Then he walks away, leaving me in silence, except for my stupid heart that thumps and thumps, alone.

Eddie Caron and all his hulking, big glory comes up behind me in the hall and puts his hand on my shoulder.

I jerk away, startled.

We both mumble, “Sorry.”

We walk together toward class.

He clears his throat and says, “You and Dylan really broke up?”

“Yeah.”

“Saturday night? When I drove by?”

“Yeah.”

“For good?”

“Yeah.”

He shakes his head. “I never would’ve believed it.”

I shrug. “Me neither.”

He bangs next to me. “Sorry. You were too good for him, though.”

I whirl on him. “No I wasn’t.”

“Sure you were.”

“No,” I whisper. “I wasn’t.”

He lets the silence nestle between us and then he says, “If you ever need anything, just let me know, okay?”

“Yeah, Eddie. Okay,” I say. I stare at this huge man/boy. Back when we were in kindergarten together and we’d hold hands waiting for the bus, he’d build me castles in the road dirt while we waited and say stuff like, “I’ll be the knight and you be the princess and I’ll protect you.”

“No, Eddie,” I’d tell him. “I want to be the queen.”

He’d nod in that slow way of his and he’d say, “Okay. You be the queen and I’ll be the knight and this is your castle and I’ll protect you.”