The Battle for Jericho (14 page)

Then we sat across from each other, and we talked and laughed some more as we ate. It was the first time Hutch and I had shared a meal alone together. It was nice. He even said so.

To me, it was almost like a date.

I felt little twinges of excitement when I looked at Hutch that afternoon. And I wanted very badly to touch his face, his hair, to put my fingers to his lips. I wanted so much to kiss him again, to pull his body against mine.

But I kept my hands off him. We finished eating, washed and put away our dishes, prepared plates for Mom and Dad, wrapped them in foil, and stashed them in the oven to keep warm. Then we went to my room and played a video game until it was time for Hutch to go home. He thanked me for dinner, I escorted him to the door, we said our good-byes, and he left.

And when he was gone, I wanted to kick myself for not finding the courage to touch him.

Chapter 12

M
AC
met me out front Friday morning, and we started the walk to school together as we usually did.

“What’s up, man?” I said by way of greeting. “How did it go for Gina Marie on her second audition after school?”

“She did great,” Mac said with enthusiasm. “She thinks she nailed it as Belle. But she won’t know for sure until Mrs. Bates announces who got what role on Monday.”

“Hey, good for her. I hope she gets the part.” He actually seemed happy this morning, and I wondered what had put him in such a good mood. “So, what did you and Gina Marie do after she finished her auditions yesterday?”

“None of your business,” Mac laughed, shoving me.

When you’re a lightweight as I am, a shove from a dude as big as Mac is about the same as being hit by a car. I was propelled some ten feet into the Richleys’ front yard, stumbling sideways. I’d have probably tumbled over if I hadn’t bumped against the thick trunk of their oak tree.

“Oh. Okay.” I straightened the backpack on my shoulders, brushed myself off, and made my way back to the sidewalk. “I get it. You two made with the nasty, huh?” By the way, I made sure I was completely out of his reach when I said that.

“The only ‘nasty’ going on around here is between your ears. Get your mind out of the gutter, Jer.” Mac stopped walking and waited for me to catch up to him. I worried for a moment that he was planning to put me in a headlock (you do not want to be put in a headlock by Mac, trust me on that), but from his expression, he appeared to have no such intention in mind. “I walked her home,” he said, falling in step with me as I caught up to him. “We sat on her porch and talked, just her and me. Man, that was so
sweet.
”

“I’ll bet.”

“She’s into sports. Can you believe it? She’s actually into sports. We sat there on her porch for over an hour and talked nothing but sports.”

“Is she a Titans fan?” I asked. That was Mac’s favorite NFL team.

“You know it,” he replied with that goofy glaze in his eyes again.

“Oh, no wonder you’re in heaven, man.”

He sighed. “I like Gina Marie. She’s great.”

“So, you gonna ask her out?”

Mac stopped smiling. “Already did. Six times so far. She keeps turning me down.”

“Sounds like she’s a tough one to crack.”

Mac switched gears suddenly. “What did you do yesterday after school?”

My throat sort of went dry. I coughed a little. “Nothing. I just went home, parked out in front of the television.”

We were approaching the intersection of Harvey Lane and Castle Street. There was Hutch, bundled in his thick denim jacket with his backpack over his shoulders, waiting. He grinned when he saw us.

“My buddy Hutch,” Mac said, grinning back at him.

“Hey, dudes.” Hutch bumped fists with each of us. “It’s Friday, it’s finally Friday.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, rubbing my palms together in anticipation.

“You got plans with Lissandra?” Mac asked.

“Nah. She’s out of town for the weekend at some debate tournament. I’m looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow.”

“Me too,” said Hutch. “Hey, you know what my mom cooked for dinner yesterday, Jerry?”

“What?”

“Corned beef and cabbage.” The gotta-barf look creased Hutch’s face before he’d even finished saying it.

I laughed. “Your favorite dish, huh?”

“Right. I’m so glad I ate dinner with you yesterday,” Hutch said.

Mac turned and looked at Hutch sharply. “Oh, so
you’re
the nothing that Jerry did yesterday after school.”

I cringed.

“Huh?” Hutch said, looking confused.

“I asked pencil neck here,” said Mac, jerking a thumb in my direction, “what he did yesterday after school. He said, ‘nothing’. So I guess having you over for dinner was a whole lot of nothing.” He shook his head in a
tsk tsk
kind of way
.
“Man. I sure wouldn’t let anybody call me nothing.”

Hutch just took that with a little smile. “It’s okay, Mac. I’m used to being nothing.”

He seemed to make a point of not looking at me when he said it.

A
FTER
school, I sneaked out the back entrance, cut across the athletic field, and made my way to Dylan’s house. He wasn’t there, so I sat down on his steps, pulled the books from my backpack, and did my homework while I waited. The picketers were still at it, but their ranks were down to just two now, tall, spare, middle-aged men in black suits marching around and around on the sidewalk with their “God Hates Fags” signs held high. I guess the rest of them had gone off to challenge some new threat to civilization. I was afraid the two men would say something to me or call me names, but they had just stared at me as I crossed the yard to the porch. One of them had shaken his head sadly in my direction, and they went marching on in their endless circle without missing a step.

They were really starting to piss me off.

“What are you doing here?”

I turned. Dylan stood at the gate that opened onto the side yard, looking at me. He wore a pair of old jeans with big smudges of dirt on the knees, an old gray jersey with a faded Dr Pepper logo across the chest, and a pair of black gardening gloves. Before I could get up, he started walking toward the porch.

“Hey, Dylan. I rang the bell and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. I didn’t think you were home. I was waiting for you.”

“I was in the backyard.” He reached the steps and stopped, leaning against the wrought iron handrail. “I took the day off to start getting things ready for winter around here. I finished raking the leaves, draining the hoses and the fountain, and I was just starting to put down mulch.” He smiled ruefully. “This is what passes for my social life these days.”

I looked again at the picketers. “They never give up, do they?”

Dylan didn’t even glance their way. “They’re a persistent bunch, all right.” He took off his gloves, which had that sharp, cedar-dirt smell of mulch.

“Can’t you get the sheriff to make them… oh, stupid me. You and the sheriff don’t get along.”

“The sheriff couldn’t do anything about those idiots even if he wanted to. Those picketers are exercising their right of free speech. They’re making their protest on a public sidewalk. As long as they don’t break any laws, there’s nothing the sheriff can do. They know that, and they are careful not to so much as drop a gum wrapper on the ground or set a foot on my property.”

“Hmph,” I snorted, eyes squinting with contempt at the old dudes in black. “What a bunch of psychos.”

“Don’t underestimate them, kid,” said Dylan. “They may be religious fanatics, but they’re good at what they do. They make their voices heard. They vote. They get people elected to office who enact laws and appoint judges to uphold their views. You notice how their numbers in this picket have dropped from twenty to twelve to just two?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s because they’ve won here. My partner’s gone, most of my neighbors don’t even speak to me now—not that all that many of them did before this mess started—and yesterday the court upheld the law banning gay adoption. The only reason those two are still out there is because I haven’t announced yet whether I’m going to appeal the court’s ruling.” Dylan raised his hands in a weary shrug. “They got everything they were protesting for.”

“Damn it,” I muttered, my head filled with helpless anger. “If only they used their powers for good.”

There was a short, resentful grunt of laughter from Dylan. “My sentiments exactly, kid.” He moved to sit down on the step below me. I scooted over to make room. There was no bandage on his head this time, and the wound in his scalp had mostly healed. “So, what brought you around today?” he asked.

“Nothing.” I put my books aside and looked down at my sneakers. Dang. For a skinny guy, I sure have big feet. I probably look like one of those boat-shoe-wearing circus clowns. “Things have been lousy. I’m confused.”

“Teenager, thy name is confusion.”

“Uh. Yeah.” I gave him a guilty glance before going back to my sneakers. “I tried to do what you said, but I just can’t seem to get it together. The first lousy part is that I haven’t broken up with my girlfriend yet.”

“Oh really?” Dylan said in this big, exaggerated voice, as if there was a joke between us.

“I keep telling myself to do it, but I just… can’t. I haven’t been able to stop liking her, to stop liking the way girls look, the way they feel when I touch them. But I did find a guy at my high school who’s already gay, and I came out to him, and we talked about dating each other.”

“And how is that going?” There was a smirk in Dylan’s tone when he asked that.

My sense of failure grew bigger, making my head drop as if it was overweighted. “That’s the second lousy part. We kind of got off to a bad start but… we kissed.”

Dylan leaned back, looking up at me with shock widening his eyes. “You actually kissed a guy?”

“Yeah. And the weird thing is… I liked it.”

“Wait. What do you mean, you liked it?”

“I mean that I liked kissing that guy. It was sort of exciting, like kissing a girl, but different. And that freaked me out. That’s not supposed to happen. I’m not supposed to like kissing another dude. And now I don’t know what to do, because… I want to kiss him again. And what if I do that? What if I do that, and I like it even more, and I start wanting to do… other things with him?”

Dylan looked at me for several moments in silence. “Jericho, I want you to take a second and think about this before you answer. Have you been attracted to guys before?”

“Not really,” I answered immediately, turning my gaze back to my feet. “I mean, I would kind of check out the other guys when we’d be in the showers at school, but it was no big deal or anything. It’s not like I got hard looking at ’em….”

Dylan waited. “I’m sensing a ‘but’ there.”

“That dude I told you about, the one I kissed, is actually a really good friend of mine. I just never knew he was on the gay team until now. He’s one of the guys I’ve seen naked in the showers. And when I think about his naked body now, I kind of, sort of… want to get hard.” I looked at Dylan helplessly. “What does that mean?”

“What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.” I glanced up at the street, just as a car moved past the house. The woman behind the wheel looked out at us, and it sent a bolt of panic through me. I didn’t know her, but she could have just as easily been someone I knew, a lady from church, some friend of my mom’s or dad’s. What was I thinking, sitting on the steps of Dylan’s house, with
Dylan
no less, where anybody could see me? My brain must have really been a scrambled mess of confusion. “Uh, can we go inside and finish talking?”

“Sure, if you want to.” Dylan got up. “The front door’s locked. Come around back.”

I scooped up my books and backpack and followed him around to the back of the house. There were two huge bags of mulch in the middle of the backyard, and I could see where he had started placing a mound of the stuff around the base of one of the dogwood trees. The door off the patio was open. Dylan tossed his dirty gloves on the ground and led me into the kitchen. He went to the sink to wash his hands, and I put my books and backpack on the table.

“You want something to drink?” Dylan asked.

“No, thanks.” I started stuffing books into my backpack. “So what’s going on with me, huh? Am I turning into a pervert or something?”

Dylan sighed. “Jericho, being attracted to guys doesn’t make you a pervert.”

“Then what does it make me?”

“I don’t know,” Dylan replied, looking at me over his shoulder. Finished at the sink, he turned off the water, grabbed a towel, and started drying his hands. “That’s something you’re going to have to figure out for yourself. You’re the only one who can do that.”

“But you’re supposed to help me figure this out. You’re the one who signed me up for this.”

“Signed you up for what?”

“To be gay!”

Dylan gave me this shocked look. “Jericho, tell me you’re kidding.”

“About what?”

“Tell me you don’t seriously believe that being gay is something you can sign up for.”