“What do you think your mom would say to me if I walked into your house right now?” he pressed.
“Um… hello John?” I didn’t like where this conversation was headed. Because it didn’t matter that my parents weren’t bigots like Rikker’s parents. I didn’t want to be their gay son.
“I bet she’d offer me cookies and milk.” He was smiling now, picturing it. “She was always good for a bag of Oreos.”
“Sure,” I said quietly. “My mom is cool. But that doesn’t mean she’d want to walk in on us in the basement. Or explain to her friends at church…” I trailed off. Because the more I spoke, the more obvious it was that I’d thought through all of this. So many times.
Rikker let a couple of miles go by before saying anything. “You know, my parents tried to convince me to go to one of those places where you pray the gay away.”
“Really?”
“I refused to go. But you know what’s funny?” he started chuckling to himself. “You know what they do at those weekend retreats? They cuddle.”
“What? You mean, like, they put you with a girl?”
“Negative. They sit everybody down on the floor in pairs, and make you cuddle a man. They have this batshit theory that gay comes from not getting the right fathering. So if a man holds you all weekend, you won’t crave that anymore.”
“You are pulling my chain.”
He shook his head. “While I do enjoy pulling your chain, this is the God’s honest truth. I met somebody who went to one of those things. He said what he really got out of it was the knowledge that he really liked cuddling men.”
Grabbing the headrest behind me, I laughed. “Best scam ever.”
“Right? That will be two thousand dollars, please.”
“What do they do if someone gets a stiffy?”
“He said you were just supposed to ignore it. But I pictured something like a fire brigade. ‘Boner alert in sector three! Get the hose!’”
He made siren noises. And I laughed as hard as I used to when I was fifteen, and we were busy deconstructing the inanity of whichever superhero movie we’d just seen.
Andthatwas why I was sitting in a car with Rikker right now. I laughed more easily today than I ever could with my other friends. Rikker already knew I was a freaking mess, so I didn’t have to expend any effort pretending that I wasn’t. In spite of the fact that we had a whole lot of baggage, there was nobody on earth who knew me like he did. It was terrifying and liberating all at once.
The miles were rolling by, though. And pretty soon we’d be back at school. Back to the grind of trying to do well and figure my own shit out at the same time. And I couldn’t help but wonder how Rikker did it. “How do you walk into that locker room every day knowing what they say about you?”
Rikker didn’t move his eyes off the road. “I dunno. I just do it. Because walking in is better than not walking in, I guess.” We rode in silence for a while. “I know I’m not a good advertisement for the product.”
“What?”
“I don’t make being ‘out’ look like fun. On the other hand, I don’t worry anymore if people are going to find out, you know? I don’t ever do that crazy math I used to do. If I left my fuck buddy’s room by eleven, I figured people wouldn’t assume we were hooking up. But twelve-thirty seemed risky.” He laughed. “None of it makes a difference if the guy emails your picture to the coach.”
“Is that picture still in circulation?”
“Why, you need a copy?”
I snorted. “Very funny. I’m just thinking that even the guys who are cool to you in the locker room probably don’t want to see that picture on any news websites.”
Rikker groaned. “It must not be out there anymore. Because that would have already happened. It was a bad shot, thank God. The camera focused on his hip instead of me. So you can only see the back of my head, which is blurry. If I hadn’t had the team tattoo on my shoulder blade, Coach might not have even believed that it was me.” He reached back to touch his shoulder for a second. “The minute I got kicked off the team, I had that thing covered up. Now I’ve got this big…”
“I saw it.” Rikker had a kick-ass black widow spider on one shoulder blade. And around her, a web spread across his back. “I like it,” I admitted. (But that was an understatement. The tat was sexy as hell.)
“Me too. It was all the artist’s idea. The red hourglass on the spider’s back is the Saint B's ink showing through. I’m not trying to be deep or anything, but I like the fact that a spider swallowed that shit up.”
“Just be careful not to ever get your picture taken again. You’d need a monstrosity to cover up that spider web.”
Rikker laughed. “I know, right? Ow.”
The rental car ate up the miles, and we passed from Vermont into Massachusetts. As we passed exit 27, Rikker held up his middle finger toward route 2, and the approach to Eastern Massachusetts.
