I shout into the rain. No words, just pain.
‘I don’t want Zeke to die,’ I say quietly.
‘Me neither, mate,’ Hammer mutters. ‘He might be okay. We gotta hope.’
I keep having visions of a doctor coming into the ED and announcing that Zeke has died, from blood loss, or amyl overdose, or the head injury.
I light a smoke. We could be waiting minutes or hours.
‘Lucky you were there,’ I say, breathing smoke into the rain. ‘What made you come to our house? Must’ve been urgent.’
Hammer pauses a fraction of a second too long. ‘You really wanna know?’ he asks, his voice more vulnerable than I’ve ever heard it. The energy between us has changed.
‘Yes,’ I say.
Hammer scuffs his shoe on the wet concrete and dislodges a pebble from the crack. ‘I wasn’t feeling so good, mate.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Wanted to end it,’ he grunts. ‘Someone’s gonna tell everyone about me. It’s over. Kept thinking about stepping straight off my balcony. I can’t take this anymore, man.’
Then my big, brawny bully wraps his arms around my midsection, head on my chest, and sobs like the little boys he used to beat up.
My shock absorbers, already fried, can’t handle this. Zeke was right. Matt was a cricketer and Hammer’s a footballer, but they’re alike in the most crucial way: their self-image can’t handle their truth.
I couldn’t save Matt.
I put my arms around Hammer and pat him on the back.
‘Hammer, I know we’ve never been mates, but I don’t want you to hurt yourself,’ I say. ‘And for the record, I’m not the one who sent those DMs.’
A fresh sob chokes in Hammer’s throat, but he doesn’t reply.
I get this sudden rush of terror. What if words don’t help, and he does something stupid anyway? Now I understand Curtis. Why he ran after Hammer yesterday. Why he takes all of us stray boys in. Why he wants to protect us all. ‘At least you have some warning,’I say. ‘I was sixteen when Alicia Stratton outed me. I had to deal with that shit, and I survived it, okay? I had no friends who had my back, nothing. You’re twenty-four. You have friends who will help you.’
‘None of my friends know about me,’ Hammer murmurs into my hoodie.
‘I meant me and Zeke, meathead.’
‘Oh.’
‘No ending things, okay?’ I say. ‘I’m done with people around me ending it. I don’t want a single guy to ever kill himself ever again if I can help it. Never do that, okay?’
‘Just feel like I’m a munted pancake,’ Hammer says, and it’s not the hoarse voice of the big footy bloke in his twenties, but the boyish, wounded voice of the frightened lad who’s been hiding this part of himself since he was a little Auskicker.
‘What?’
‘The one that didn’t get cooked right. Feel like I don’t matter. Like I should get chucked in the bin.’
Auskick Hammer holds me tighter, his skull hard against my solar plexus. He’s hugging me too rough and hurting me, but I know to break away now would be fatal to him.
‘Hammer,’ I say. ‘Even if you were the most munted pancake in the world, you would still matter.’
Hammer and I talk outside for ages. He tells me he’s sorry for how he treated me when I was outed in year eleven. I tell him so he fucking should be.
I tell Hammer I’m sorry I protested him when I knew he was closeted. He says it’s okay, but I feel guilty about it. I should never have sided against him.
I steer Hammer towards his next steps. If he’s going to be outed, he can either wait for it to happen, come out first, or call the blackmailer’s bluff and do nothing.
