And you think you might actually mean it.
25DAYTON
You never should’ve accepted that coffee. But it was free after the Starbucks drive-through messed up Marshall’s order and had to remake it. You didn’t want it to go to waste.
You never liked coffee before. You’re pretty sure you still don’t, and never will. Still, with sugar and cream and caramel and chocolate and whatever else was in it, it tasted more like dessert than coffee.
You’ve had plenty of Coke before, but the caffeine in coffee hit you different. Made you feel weird and unsettled.
Made you have to pee, too.
Everything was fine in choir. ELA too. But halfway through German it hit you. Thank god Frau likes you and didn’t give you grief when you asked for a hall pass.
You’re fine now, except you think your hand might be shaking a little bit. And your mouth is dry. And it feels like you can smell your own coffee breath deep down in the back of your sinuses, like a cat making that weird face so it can smell things with the roof of its mouth.
You’re so distracted trying to smell your own breath as you head back to Frau’s class, you walk right past Brody hovering in a cross hall. You back up.
“Hey,” you say. He’s not alone. Reggie’s with him, too, the both of them leaning against a locker. You can’t tell if they have hall passes or not. Some teachers just give slips of paper or whatever, but not Frau.
Her hall pass is a plastic miniature of a helmet, the old-timey kind with the spike on top. The chin strap is looped around your wrist, which made washing your hands unwieldy.
Brody goes in for a fist bump, leaning away from the locker, and you realize it’s covered in thick-point Sharpie. You can only make out the last three letters, but your breath catches.
“Brody…,” you warn.
“Be cool, man,” Reggie says.
“It’s just a joke,” Brody adds. “Come on.”
“It’s not cool,” you say. “It’s not a joke.”
You didn’t know better when you shouted it out at a stranger, but you do now. You think of what Farshid said: that it makes people afraid.
You don’t want people to be afraid of you. You don’t want your classmates to be afraid at all.
“Why are you doing this?” you ask, because you honestly can’t figure it out. Yeah, Brody’s crass sometimes, and yeah, he’s always “no homo” this, “no homo” that, but Brody’s not a bad guy.
He’s not.
He’s doing a bad thing, though.
The hallway is cool, but your skin feels hot, like you’ve been in the sun too long and it’s going to burn.
Brody leans in, a smile lighting his face. “Yesterday I heard Farshid ask out Cooper.”
You blink.
You heard that wrong.
Right?
Cooper’s straight. At least he was last time you checked, which, granted, was over the summer. Yeah, he and Farshid talk sometimes in conditioning, but wow. You don’t know what to feel about all this. But still, that doesn’t excuse them—
“Wait, is that Cooper’s locker?”
“Nah, Farshid’s.” Reggie laughs, glancing both ways down the hall before turning back and going in for another layer of Sharpie. “I always thought he was sus. But for, like, being a terrorist, not for being gay.”
“Stop!” you say, grabbing for Reggie’s arm, throwing off his linework on theT.
