True Letters from a Fictional Life (12 page)

“Your freaking dog was climbing on my head.”

“He has boundary issues.” Topher shrugged. He grabbed a napkin from the glove compartment to wipe my face. I felt like I was six years old. “Hold freaking still,” he chided. For a second, I thought he was going to lick the napkin the way my grandmother used to, and the thought of it made me start giggling. “Would you quit moving? Your face is filthy. You look like you crawled out of the woods.”

“I look tough?”

“Yeah,” he snickered. “Dirty is so tough.” He put his hand on my waist and reached over me to clean my other
cheek. I closed my eyes and felt my heart race when he began to kiss my neck. Ten minutes later we heard tires on the gravel road on the other side of the trees, and we both sat up fast. Topher had his car moving before the ranger's pickup had even reached us.

My parents had gone to visit Luke up at school, and they took Rex with them. I wasn't interested in fending off a party, so I hadn't mentioned this fact to anyone. Topher and I grabbed a sandwich after dropping Angus off at his place, and then we went back to my empty house, where I changed out of my muddy jeans. Topher was pretending to read my palm on the couch when there was a knock on the front door. Derek and Theresa.

“We were driving past, so we figured we'd see what you were up to, see if you're feeling better. Whose car is that?”

Topher came out of the living room. “Hey. Same thing. I was in the neighborhood. Figured I'd stop by to say hi.”

Derek and Theresa smiled and nodded. “Nice,” Theresa said.

“Come in,” I said. It might've been the first time I'd ever had to invite them into my house.

“It's okay. We should go,” Theresa said. “We were just stopping by to say hi.”

“No!” I yelped, although I wanted them to leave so very badly. “You don't have to go!” I made it sound like a crazy idea. “My parents are out of town, so, you know, we were just
hanging out. Who are you calling?”

“Hawken and Mark,” Derek said. “Hawken has some beers. Can we have a fire out back?”

We kept it to just us six. There were enough stumps around the old fire ring for everyone to have a seat. Derek took charge of building the fire, and the rest of us stared up through black branches at the stars while big trees creaked and clattered in the wind. When Theresa leaned against me, I glanced over at Topher. Looking down, he scratched the back of his head. I knelt on the ground to offer Derek help. “I got it,” he muttered, balling tiny twigs and birch bark into kindling. Theresa walked away, back toward the house. Soon flames crackled, and Derek blew the base of the fire to a roar.

“Look at how fast that plane's going!” Hawken cried. “Way up there. That little dot. It's booking!”

“Are you sure that's a plane? Could be a satellite, right?” Mark asked. “Derek? Plane or satellite?”

Derek stood up from the fire. It took some pointing and directing, but eventually he saw it. “Oh, satellite. It's way, way too small to be a plane.”

“Maybe it's a UFO,” said Hawken.

“It's not an Unidentified Flying Object because I just identified it as a satellite.”

“MFO,” suggested Hawken. “Misidentified Flying Object. Last time we had the telescope out, Derek told us that there is definitely intelligent life on other planets. Without a doubt, a hundred percent certainty, there is another
civilization out there among all those stars, and when they find us, they will enslave us.”

“I did not say they would enslave us.” Derek laughed.

“It's a good bet, though, right? Why wouldn't they shackle us and sell us to an intergalactic mining company?”

“Maybe it's a whole 'nother civilization of black people, Derek,” said Mark.

Just the crackle of the fire.

“But maybe,” continued Hawken, “when they get here, they'll just die from common colds or, I don't know, pollen allergies or something like that, so our horrific ordeal won't last all that long.”

“Gluten might be fatal to them.” Mark nodded. “Sulfites. The good thing is, we'll be safe up here in Vermont. They won't be able to find us in the hills. It'll just be in the major cities where people get rounded up and shipped off to, you know, work to death in cobalt factories or what have you.”

“Cobalt?” asked Derek.

“Or any kind of factory.”

“Mark?” Derek asked, breaking sticks and feeding them to the flames. “Are you planning to stay here forever?”

“Where? America?”

“No, here. In this town. You don't want to go explore a big city sometime?”

“I like it here. Why would I want to leave?”

“Sure. I mean, I guess you got everything you need,” said Derek. “Plenty of fresh water.” He fell in to a Southern
accent. “Critters to chase and chew on. Leaves for good bedding. Maybe when you
de
-cease your restaurant will mount your head on the wall.”

“They put up real art,” Mark pointed out. “Paintings and crap like that.”

Theresa reappeared. She was wearing a hoodie that was too big for her.

“Hey,” I barked. “Is that my hoodie?”

“Yup. I'm borrowing it.”

“Where'd you find it?”

“In your room. On the chair.”

I just shook my head.

The wind shifted and blew smoke right into her face. “I hate white rabbits I hate white rabbits I hate white rabbits,” she hollered. The smoke changed directions again. “See?” She grinned. “It does work. It's magic.”

“Just like James's Magic Soccer Socks,” said Hawken.

“You have Magic Socks?” Topher asked. “What, they help you score?”

“They help him cripple his enemies,” explained Hawken. “Like that goalie.” He laughed. “James has a little goalie friend on another team.”

“My school's goalie? Sean Gates?” asked Topher, grinning.

I stared at him, wide-eyed. “Different goalie,” I said quickly. “I don't know his name. We got in a shoving match a few weeks ago, but I was wearing my Magic Socks, so, you
know, he was vanquished.”

“The socks layeth him on the plastic grass,” Hawken said solemnly. “In the manner of the departed.”

“I didn't know you were a fighter,” said Topher. He didn't sound impressed.

“He's not,” said Mark, smirking. “Who needs another one?” He counted all the raised hands—Derek and I raised both—and wandered into the woods to pee.

“Isn't he supposed to be
not
drinking?” whispered Derek.

“Yeah,” Hawken whispered back. “You try telling him that.”

We hung out around the fire for an hour or so, mostly listening to Mark talk about girls. At one point he disappeared into my house to fetch a yearbook from my room so he could remind us of who these girls were. Mark asked Topher his opinion about each one.

“Sure, she's pretty,” Topher would say.

“She's not pretty. She's hot! Right?”

“Sure,” said Topher.

Hawken and I tried hard to change the subject, but Mark always brought it back to girls. Eventually, Topher announced he had to go.

Derek waggled his bottle and asked, “You're
driving
home?”

“I haven't had a drop,” said Topher. “And I have an early-morning rehearsal. So I should split.”

“I'll walk back to the house with you. I'm going to grab
my water bottle,” I said.

In the dark by his car, we kissed good night. “Maybe you should just stay over?” I whispered. He laughed. He couldn't. He'd see me soon.

When I came back into the house, Derek was standing in the middle of the kitchen, arms folded. “Hey. I want to ask you something,” he said. He coughed and stared hard at the floor.

I dug my hands in my pockets and waited for him to speak. He looked up again, pointed a finger toward the front door and said, “That dude. Topher—”

I interrupted him. “He's a good guy, right? It's nice making friends at other schools. Instead of the same old crowd—”

Derek flinched. “What, you're
bored
with us?”

“No, I'm not
bored
with you,” I began, but Theresa, Mark, and Hawken barged in through the back door just then. Derek looked at the ceiling and turned away from me, placing his hands on the counter and leaning forward as if he were being sick.

“Last call!” shouted Mark. “It's time to go home! Last call! Last call!”

“I just hit my exhaustion wall, and you guys are out of beer, anyway,” said Theresa. “So it's past last call and your designated driver is on the way out the door.”

Derek walked past me without a word.

“Hey, where's my hoodie?” I asked as all four of them went down the front steps.

“Derek already put it back up there. Right?”

“Is she lying, Derek?” I called after him.

He yelled over his shoulder. “I put it back!”

I waved from the porch as they reversed down the driveway, and then I walked up to the Guaranteed Cell Phone Reception Zone in Luke's room and sent Topher a good night text. I fell asleep on Luke's bed waiting for a reply.

I shuffled into my own
room the next morning and stopped dead in my tracks. My keys were lying on a notebook. I had not put them there. I never put them there. Not ever. I put them in the coffee can full of coins. Always. It's why I don't lose them. I remembered distinctly putting them in there the night before because I had growled at Aaron's alligator PEZ dispenser when I did so. Someone had been handling my keys.

Cursing, I fumbled with the keys and opened my top desk drawer. They were still there. My letters. “Thank you,” I sighed as I picked up the whole pile. What was the last one I wrote? That letter to Theresa.

It wasn't on top. A letter to my soccer coach was first.

I broke into a prickly sweat and flipped through the dozens of handwritten pages. Nothing. It wasn't on the bottom of the stack either. I checked the drawer again. Empty. I closed my eyes and thought back to the night I wrote it. Did I remember putting it in the drawer? Could I have put it in another notebook or somewhere else? Maybe it got mixed up with my schoolwork? I rifled through my backpack, through all the papers on my desk, through my recycling box, through my stack of blank printer paper. Nothing. Twice more through everything. One by one through the letters, front and back. It wasn't there. Was I sure I wrote it? I could picture it. I'd drawn a little swirly coil in the top corner.

Someone had it. And if they took that one, they probably took others, too. Someone knew everything about me. My whole story.

Collapsing on my bed, I shoved my head under my pillow and thought back to the previous night. Who had been up in my room? Almost everyone. Mark had gone up at least twice—once to get a yearbook so he could point out girls he liked and once, obeying my command, to put the yearbook back. Theresa had wandered in to borrow my hoodie. Derek had returned it. Even Topher had been up there on a self-guided tour of the house. He hung out in my room long enough to be able to comment on photographs, books, and random stuff on my shelves, but he had no motive to go digging.

I rolled off my bed and picked up the letters again. Was the one to Theresa the only one missing? There was one I'd written to Hawken back in the fall that complained about his laziness during one of our games. Found it. Were there more? A letter to my mom, my dad, Luke, Derek, Aaron, my soccer coach, my chemistry teacher, the weatherman from Vermont Public Radio's
Eye on the Sky
. I couldn't remember all the letters I'd written since freshman year, but I spent the next couple of hours trying. I'd think of a single line I'd scrawled, and then I'd shuffle through the pages until I found it. I found nearly every memorable phrase I looked for. For the few I couldn't find, I couldn't remember if I'd actually written them down or just thought them. Eventually, I'd read so many pages that I could barely recall what I'd written over the past few weeks, let alone years.

I decided the best way to deal with it was to wait and see whether anyone said anything. There was no point in stirring things up before I even knew what had happened. Maybe I'd just misplaced the letter or overlooked it. Maybe it would turn up in a notebook or pocket. Stuff presumed stolen has a way of turning up and making you feel like a jackass.

I was under my bed with a flashlight doing another scan for the letter when the front doorbell rang. On my way to the stairs, I peeked out a window in the top hall and spotted Theresa's car in the driveway. “Oh, man,” I sighed.

“The doorbell?” I said as I let her in. “That's a first.”

“Well, why is it locked?” No hug or anything, which was weird. “What's with the flashlight? And why are you covered in dust?”

“I'm looking for something,” I muttered, leading her into the kitchen. “What's up?”

“Are you super hungover?” she asked, wincing.

“I had, like,
two
beers last night. That's why you came over here? To give me a hard time about drinking?”

She sat down without taking off her jacket and didn't look up at me. “I came over to ask you about something, and I want you to be honest with me, James.”

I folded my arms. If she was going to drop in unannounced and force the issue, I wasn't going to make it easy for her. “Is this talk going to take all day?”

“Do you want to sit down in case it does?”

“Not really.”

She got to the point much more quickly than I'd expected. “What's going on with you and Topher?” she asked quietly.

I dodged the question. “Did you steal letters out of my desk last night?”

She just stared at me, not denying it. Her silence screamed guilt. I banged my flashlight on the counter. “Do you have them here?”

She looked at me as though I'd just thrown up on myself. “I don't know what you're talking about. And you haven't answered my question. What's going on between you and Topher?”

“He's a good guy, and I like hanging out with him. Is that a crime? Why is it your business?”

She stood up, her hands in fists. “You must be
joking
me.” She seethed. I'm not sure I'd ever seen her so angry. “Why is this my business? You've been lying to me for years, leading me on and making me think we might get serious someday, and now you want to know why it's my business when I find out you're gay?”

“Whoa, whoa!” I yelled, hands up. “Slow down. Who told you that?”

“Oh, please. I'm not an idiot, James. But Kim confirmed it, anyway—by accident. I kept asking her what she thought was going on, and she kept saying ‘talk to James, talk to James' until she slipped and said ‘I promised I'd let him tell you.'”

That seemed like more than a slip to me, but all I could do was shake my head. I had no way out. “This isn't how I wanted this conversation to go,” I muttered.

“Oh, because you wanted to lie to me some more? String me along for another year or two?” She wasn't backing down.

“I wasn't trying to lie,” I said angrily.

“No, clearly lying comes very easily to you.”

“Oh my God.” I bent double, head in my hands, then stood back up. “Way to be melodramatic. Did you rehearse your lines before coming over here or what? Sometimes you are such a freaking—”

She cut me off by stepping forward, her hand raised as if she were going to slap me, but she caught herself and just
shoved her finger in my face instead. “The only thing you should be saying to me right now is ‘I'm sorry.' You should be
begging
me for forgiveness.”

I put my hands in my pockets and glared at the floor. She was waiting for my apology, but she wasn't getting one. Not yet, anyway. After a long, painful silence, I shifted my feet and mumbled, “Let me be the one to talk to my friends.”

“Oh, right,” she gasped. “Because all of this is about you and your friends. You are
such
a selfish little boy.”

She stalked out of the kitchen as I rolled my eyes to the ceiling. When I heard her opening the front door, I yelled, “Cuz threatening to hit people is so mature, right?”

The door slammed behind her.

That went well. I stood staring out the window for a while, but no easy solutions presented themselves. Groaning in frustration, I grabbed my running shoes.

Usually running helps me sort things out, gain some perspective on problems. Not this time. When I came in from my five-mile loop, my parents and Rex were back, but no one had left an apology message on my phone, my letter or letters were still stolen, and the culprit was still one of my best friends.

The next day, Sunday, my father and I worked in the yard. We cleaned the gutters, yanked dead plants from flower beds, and cut down a pine out back that had lost limbs during a heavy wet snow. I raked the entire backyard once and had
started on round two when my dad came over, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “That's probably good.” So I went inside and buried myself in homework for the rest of the day.

At the dinner table, I barely spoke. Rex dominated the conversation, as he'll do when given the chance, by recounting six or seven
Calvin and Hobbes
comic strips. Evidently, my parents were caught up in their own heads, too, because no one tried to change the subject. I think Rex figured out that no one was listening, because when I looked up, he was quietly stabbing his cauliflower.

As I finished washing the dishes, my mom asked, “You okay?”

“Lot of homework.”

“Is it Theresa?”

“We're just friends.” I'd said it so often that it sounded robotic. Although I wasn't sure if she still
was
my friend anymore.

She nodded. “Is that the problem?”

“Not for me it isn't.”

“But maybe for her it is?”

“It's not Theresa.” A bad slip—now she knew something was up.

“Then what is it?”

“Chemistry,” I lied. “I'm terrible at it.”

“Well, if there's anything else going on—”

“Nope.” I disappeared into my room for the rest of the night. I typed
coming out to parents
into Google and read a
dozen articles that gave advice about how to start the conversation. I would have to talk to them soon.

Topher had also given me a few tips, and I included some of them in the letter I scribbled that night. To be honest, I thought twice about writing it—what if it disappeared, too?—but I had decided that no one was coming into my room ever again, and my pirate key was never going to leave my pocket.

Sunday, May 22nd

Dear Mom and Dad,

Next Sunday's the day I'm going to tell you I like boys. It's a long drive home from my soccer game in Grantham, and I'll ask Hawken to drive himself, so we'll be alone in the car. When we hit the highway, I'll take a deep breath and say the magic words. Unlike me, the road is straight there, so if I tell you on that stretch, you probably won't drive off into a ditch. I've read a couple of “coming out to parents” tips online and my friend Topher—my friend who is a boy who I've kissed and so I suppose is maybe my boyfriend—gave me some good advice, so I'm prepared to tell you that, no, this isn't just a phase, that I don't need to see a psychologist, that it's not your fault, that I wasn't molested as a kid, and that I'm aware of the HIV risks. (I'm debating whether to say, “I'm wearing a condom right now.” Is that over the line? That's probably over the line.) I'm ready to answer your questions and to tell you where you can go to read respectable, authoritative, non-pornographic information
about all this stuff. I'm even going to pack some cookies in case your blood pressure drops or skyrockets upon hearing my news. If the conversation gets out of control, if there's yelling and screaming, there are a bunch of exits between the one for Grantham and the one for 91. You can drop me at any of them and I'll call Topher to come get me. I'll pack my toothbrush and a towel—thanks for the tip, Douglas Adams. At least I'll have that much and my soccer gear if you disown me.

Your loving, not-straight son,

James