The silence beat loudly in my ears, echoing with all the words I could not make myself say.
“Maybe we’ll be okay, you know?” he whispered eventually. “Maybe things will get a little easier for us. You should visit me this summer in Vermont. If you made it a long visit, we could work for this apple orchard near Gran’s house. They do blueberries and peaches before the apples are ripe. The pay isn’t bad, and you get to be outside all day. We could go to guerrilla night again, or maybe clubbing in Montreal.”
The sudden change in topic was a little confusing to me, but I liked the sound of this.
“…But if you can only get away for a weekend, or something, I think we should go camping instead. That could be awesome. How does sex beside a campfire sound? Wait… the mosquitoes could be a problem. Maybe sex in a tent, then.” Rikker chuckled to himself.
“Anyway, that’s going to be my happy thought, until you’re better. If your mom is around all the time, I’m not going to get to see you. I know she wouldn’t mind me coming by, but
I’d
mind. I don’t think I can be in this room with you and have to watch what I say all the time. I don’t mind tricking a bunch of homophobic athletes, but I don’t want to lie to your mom, G. She’s always been good to me.”
The silence stretched for a moment, and I could almost hear him struggling with his thoughts.
“Ugh. Okay,” he continued. “Happy thoughts. Vermont. Drive-in movies. Dancing to bad music with you. As Gran would say, this too shall pass. Although I find myself saying that a lot lately.” He hugged me even tighter. “I’m going to go now, G. So sleep tight. Call me if you can tomorrow. Wait. I can’t believe I just reminded a sleeping person to call me. How ‘bout I call you? Yeah? It’s a plan.”
I found enough muscle control to grin against his shirt.
He set me back down on the pillow. Then I received a single kiss on the lips. It was soft and sweet, and I did my best to return it.
Then I felt him pull away. His footsteps retreated quietly across my room. A crack of painful hallway light infiltrated my dark cave, and then he was gone.
* * *
The next seven days went by very slowly. The Beaumont dean helped Mom rent a discounted hotel room at the college conference center. “I’m not going home until I know you don’t need help,” she said.
Unfortunately, I really did need help. And I hated that.
The all-over headaches began to ease up, becoming intermittent instead of constant. But I still got an odd pain across my brow line, as if someone had pulled a cord that cinched my face too tightly. It came on whenever I focused my eyes on a book for longer than ten minutes.
So Mom did most of the reading. We sat in my room — me on the bed, and her in the desk chair — and she read chapter after chapter to me of developmental psychology and Roman history. She also attended my classes, taking notes for me.
Until you’ve dragged your mom to three lectures a day, you haven’t lived.
By dinnertime, we were always exhausted and rather tired of each other. But we ate together anyway, sometimes putting in a little more reading time after dinner. And then she’d retreat to her hotel room, and I’d lie on my bed doing nothing. I couldn’t even surf the web, because staring at the screen made my head hurt. So I listened to playlist after playlist, tossing a tennis ball over my head and catching it again.
Meanwhile, my hockey team was busy trying to set new records for post-season victories. They beat Providence in the semis, advancing to the conference championship. Rikker had long practices every night. A few times he stopped by afterwards, but I was pretty much useless by nine o’clock. And usually grumpy. Which made him sort of grumpy too.
It sucked. All of it.
Coach called me to ask me if I wanted to ride the bus to Colgate with the team. “This is your game too, kid. I’d make room for you at the hotel.”
“Wow, Coach,” I said, feeling a little choked up. “That is such a nice offer.” I searched for a reason to say no, though. “I have a doctor’s appointment on Friday, and my mom is real eager to see what they say. And she’s been so much help to me that I’d feel bad about blowing it off.”
“Let me know how that goes, okay? Shoot me an email.”
“I’ll be watching the game on TV, Coach. Can’t wait.”
“Hang in there, kid.”
Could I have gone to that game? Probably. But I just wasn’t ready. It was partly that I still felt like shit all the time. The glare and noise of a jam-packed hockey stadium wouldn’t have been easy on me. But that wasn’t the whole problem. For the first time ever, I was reluctant to face my teammates. If I walked into the room, they’d look at me and remember that the last time they saw me I was screaming Rikker’s name.
A smarter man would talk this over with Rikker, and ask if there had been any further discussion about me. Rikker would probably remind me that that paranoia is one of the many symptoms of concussion. He’d say that I was being ridiculous. That these were my friends. And by the way — who fucking cares what they think?
Well, I did, unfortunately. And I was always going to care. When I walked out of the room, I didn’t want them whispering about me. I didn’t want anyone to look at me and think
sick
.
Paranoia was a symptom of being Michael Graham.
* * *
The Thursday before Rikker’s big game, my mom decided to take the train to Manhattan to have lunch with my sister. “She can only take an hour and a half for lunch,” my mom said, rolling her eyes. “But she promised not to check her messages every two minutes during the meal.”
We’d just come back from statistics class, and I dumped my backpack on the dorm room floor. “You raised quite the brood, Mom. You’re keeping company with either your bitchy daughter or your grumpy, dopey son.”
“I love you both equally, all the time,” she winked at me.
“Even during statistics class?” We’d gotten ornery at each other a half hour ago, when she’d had trouble keeping up with the formulas the professor had written on the whiteboard.
Mom tucked her phone into her purse and prepared to leave. “Even then.” She looked at me, her face serious now. “I don’t mind all this, Mikey. I like that I have this extra chance to take care of you for a little while.” She took two steps and hugged me. “You’re still my baby, you know. If my baby needs me to draw the Z and T distributions on graph paper, I’ll do it.”
Oh, man. Watch the concussion patient get emotional.
Again
. I had to swallow hard a few times before I could choke out, “Thanks, Mom.”
She let go of me and went to the door. “I’ll bring you some dinner when I come back. Okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Then she was gone, and I was alone for the first time in a week.
I sat down on my bed and pulled out my phone. Rikker answered on the first ring. “
Hola, Miguel
,” he said. “How’s the head?”
“Not bad,” I said. “What are you doing right now?”
“
Voy a la clase de Español
.”
“Okay. What about after that?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“Well, Mom went to the city to hang out with Lori,” I said, feeling excited for something for the first time in a week. “Come over. I’ll get us some lunch.”
“That’s cool. I could pick something up,” Rikker offered.
“No, I got it. What else am I going to do with the next hour? It’s really boring to be me.” I still couldn’t read, and if I looked at a screen for more than a couple of minutes, I got a headache. I wasn’t even supposed to exercise much. Having a concussion made me into a waste of space.
“Okay. I’ll be there. I don’t have practice today, either.”
“Really?”
“Really. Coach gave us the day off. He says he wants us rested for tomorrow night.”
“I can help with that. All I do is rest.”
“You’re hired. See you in an hour.”
I bought meatball subs for lunch, because I remembered that Rikker had always loved those back in Michigan. (In Connecticut, though, subs are called “grinders” for some reason.)
Rikker came through the door whistling at a quarter past twelve. We clobbered our lunch while Rikker caught me up on the hockey gossip. Coach had Trevi playing defense. And Pepé the French kid? We all knew that his surname name was Gerault, because it said so on his jersey. “The revelation this week? His
real
first name is actually Pepé.”
“No shit!” I laughed. “I thought it was just a joke.”
“I know, right?” Rikker wadded up his sandwich wrapper and tossed it into my trash bin.
“Two points,” I said automatically. Then I yawned.
“Do you need to sleep?” Rikker asked.
“Not necessarily,” I said, because I didn’t want him to go. Though I’d already complained to him how weird it was that I couldn’t make it through the afternoon without a nap.
“You look beat,” he said. “Lie down, G. I could use a nap too.”
I didn’t know if that was true. But if I didn’t close my eyes for a little while, I’d only get a headache. So I set the alarm on my phone for three o’clock, just in case. The train ride back from New York took an hour and forty-five minutes. My mom couldn’t possibly walk through the door before three or three-thirty.
Then I lay down on my bed, and Rikker kicked off his shoes. We’d never napped together. In fact, he’d never been to my room like this, in the middle of the day. This was all brand new territory.
Rikker stretched out beside me, and then opened his arms. I went willingly, resting my head on his shoulder, wrapping an arm around his waist. He kissed the top of my head. And then, as if one just wasn’t enough, he did it again. And that made me irrationally happy. I’d had one of the shittiest weeks of my life. But with Rikker pressed warm and solid against me, none of it mattered.
And here was another first — I’d never lain beside Rikker before without turning into an instant horn dog. But today I fell right to sleep.
Two hours later, I awoke in a panic to the sound of my room door opening. Startled, I sat up fast, spasming into damage-control mode. Even asleep, I was worried about being busted napping with Rikker.
But it was Rikker himself who came through the door. “Easy, tiger,” he said. “It’s just me.” He carried two paper coffee cups, one stacked on top of the other, balanced with his chin.
Taking a slow breath, I willed by heart rate back into the normal range. “Did you sleep?” I asked, my voice hoarse.
“Sure did. Just not as long as you. I brought you a double cappuccino. Hope you like it.”
“Thanks.” I took the cup from him, cracked the little sipping window and tasted it. “Wow.” It was milky and fantastic. So I removed the lid entirely and took a big gulp. “I guess the Italians know a thing or two about coffee.”
Rikker eyed me over the top of his own cup. “You never order these?”
I shook my head, struck by two things. In the first place, it was depressing that my own boyfriend didn’t know how I drank my coffee. When you only see someone in the dark of night, these are the little details that go missing. We had the relationship of a pair of vampires.
Even worse, I’d made it to age twenty-one without ordering a cappuccino. Because at some point during my ignorant youth, I’d heard somebody say that it was a girly drink. And I’d crossed cappuccinos off the list without a second thought. That’s how I’d always done it. There were a
thousand
little decisions I made in service to hiding something big. All my clothes were blue or gray or black. (Except my hockey jacket. And there could hardly be a manlier piece of clothing.) My backpack was a plain color. My bedspread was regulation navy blue. I lived by a weird, self-imposed aesthetic, focused on never appearing gay.
The result? Not only did Rikker not know my taste in coffee, I didn’t either.
Rikker made himself comfortable on my beanbag chair, and sipped his coffee. “How are you feeling?”
I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. “Today I feel a little better. Finally.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said, kicking off his shoes. “What were you supposed to read next? I’ll take a shift, if you want.”
I swirled my excellent coffee, so that none of the foam would be left behind in the cup. “My mom would be pumped if you read a couple chapters of Roman history. She hates that book.”
“Pass it over,” he said.
With his feet propped up into my lap, he read to me for over an hour. Listening to the rough, warm sound of his voice, I felt happier than I’d been in a week. I’d needed this — a few casual hours with him. Just having Rikker in the room with me was like medicine.
Unfortunately for him, Mom was right — Rikker was reading from the least interesting book on earth. Eventually he let it fall into his lap. “
Fuck
, G. Aren’t there any naughty bits in here?” He’d just read another stifling paragraph about Roman wall painting. “Can we skip to the part about the orgies?”
“I wish.”
“I’m pretty sure the Romans liked to get it on. What chapter is that?”