Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 16:22:39 -0800 (PST) From: SJL Subject: Paul and Adam Chapter 10 This is just a little mini-chapter, about half the length the rest of the chapters are. I'm still distracted and don't have much time to write, but I hope this will tide you over for the next few days. =) My email address is geekwriter143@yahoo.com, and my website is http://veggiegrlaz.tripod.com On to Chapter 10, from Adam's POV ----------------------------------------- The sign on the pool gate says, "Practice cancelled due to baby. Have a good long weekend. See you 6:30am Tuesday morning." It's written in a fast scrawl, but it's definitely Coach's handwriting. "What's that?" Jake asks as he walks up the sidewalk behind me. "I guess Annie's finally having the baby," I say. Jake scratches the back of his neck as he reads the sign. "Tuesday," he mutters. "I hate the indoor pool." Once classes start, we practice in the small pool in the basement of the middle school so that we can make it to first period at 8am. "You think we should at least swim some easy sets?" Jake asks. "Nah," I say. I'm anxious to get home. I can get the tent and sleeping bags out of the basement, set everything up and make sure it works, clean out the tent, get the food Paul and I will need ready. "Catch you later," I say to Jake as I hop on my bike and take off. I know Paul's not too excited about camping, but he's old enough to know not to walk through poison ivy, now. And we can go skinny-dipping in the river, and eat s'mores, and have sex outside all day long. We won't even have to put on clothes if we don't want to. I drop my bike in the front yard when I get home and hurry inside, mentally composing a checklist of everything I need to get ready before we leave tomorrow night. There's the tent and the sleeping bags, the self-inflating mattresses, sunscreen and bug spray. I should definitely make some GORP and pack apples and a jar of peanut butter and... I drop my backpack at the end of the hallway. Rebecca's standing in my doorway with her arms crossed across her waist. She doesn't see me; she's focused on whatever's going on in my room. "What the hell do you think you're doing, Jim?" she says. "What is this supposed to prove?" "Stay out of this," my father snaps. "I know he's your son, and I'm not about to pretend that I know the first thing about being a parent, but I'm not just going to lie and tell you that I think you're doing the right thing." She sighs and runs her fingers through her hair. "You're acting like a crazy person. What do you think you're going to find?" I walk slowly down the hallway. My father's going through my room. From the sound of things, he's ripping it apart. I feel weird and trapped, like I'm outside of myself, like I want to run in there and make him stop but I can't. "What do you think you're going to find?" Rebecca asks again, this time she slams her hand against my open door. "What the fuck good do you think this is doing?" I'm standing right behind her and she doesn't even know I'm there. "Either help me look or stay out of this!" My father is pulling everything out of my dresser. All of my socks and underwear, t-shirts, shorts, everything gets tossed to the floor as he grabs handfuls out of each drawer. He slams the middle drawer and opens the one below it and as he does the dresser shakes and trophies fall over and one of my medals hits the floor. The sheets have been ripped off my bed. My mattress is upturned and halfway on the bed, halfway on the floor. The drawers in my desk are all open and there are papers and pens on the floor. All my new notebooks for school are spread across the carpet. My father's stepping on one of them as he rips open the bottom drawer of my dresser and starts going through my jeans and cords. "If you tell me what you're looking for I can probably tell you where it is," I say softly. Rebecca jumps and turns, her hands pressed to her throat. "Adam," she whispers. I walk past her into my room. "What the fuck?" I ask my father. "Why aren't you at practice?" he demands. "Annie went into labor. What are you doing?" I sound a lot calmer than I feel. I bend down and pick up a picture of Pieter van den Hoogenband that my father had ripped off the wall. My hands are shaking. In the last few weeks before she finally left, all my mother gave him was stillness. It seemed to be the only weapon he couldn't fight. I guess it's lucky for me that it's all I feel capable of at the moment. "What the did you do to my room?" I ask. I walk through the debris on the floor and sit on the exposed box spring. "Those were new," I say, looking at the notebooks trampled beneath my father's feet. "Those were for school next week." My father takes a deep breath and looks at me, then looks at the folded jeans in his hand, then at Rebecca. Rebecca crosses her arms over her chest. "Happy?" she asks. "If you're looking for drugs, I don't use them," I say. "And couldn't you have just asked me, first?" Rebecca raises her eyebrows at my father, waiting for his answer. "Well?" she asks. "Aren't you going to tell him what you were looking for, tough guy?" I really wish I didn't like Rebecca as much as I do. It would be a lot easier to figure out what the hell was going on if I had an evil stepmother who was trying to poison my father against me. But, no, this entire freak out appears to be entirely my father's doing. My father looks around my room like he's just realized what a freaking mess he's made. "Adam," he says softly. "I didn't mean to..." "Throw all my clean clothes on the floor?" I offer. "Ruin all my new school stuff? Flip my mattress off the bed?" I sigh when I see that my State Championship picture has fallen off my dresser and that the glass has shattered. "So," I say, getting up and picking the frame up carefully, "you weren't looking for drugs. What, then?" I stand up and face him. "What made you destroy all my shit, huh?" The shock is fading and the anger feels good as it fills me. "Now, you just calm down," he says. His voice is shaking. "You calm down right now." I throw the picture at him and it shatters against the wall next to his head. "Get out of my room!" He leaves the room slowly, practically backs out. Once he's out I slam the door as hard as I can and lock it. I slide down the door and pull my knees to my chest as I survey the wreckage of my room. I don't know what made him suspect it, but I know what he was looking for. There's only one thing I'm hiding. I look around the room. There's nothing for him to find, anyway. There are condoms in my bedside table, but it's one of the few drawers he didn't open. Not that it would matter if he found them. Condoms don't prove anything. The first condoms I got were for Laci, anyway. I get up and rush to my closet, step up on a shelf and pull down a shoebox I'd stashed behind my winter clothes. He hadn't even gotten to my closet. He hadn't found the box. I lift a folded piece of paper out of the box and open it and read. "When I make love to you, when I hold you and your body is beneath mine, so close, my weight pressing down onto you and you taking it, arching up, pressing up against me wanting more, then I'm so lost in you, completely unaware of anything except you, too oblivious then to even realize what I do every other moment, which is that I am so lucky to have you. "Yesterday you were eating a bagel with strawberry cream cheese, and I watched the way you skimmed the top of the cream cheese out of the tub and spread it carefully on your bagel and I loved you so much right then. It welled up inside me so strong it almost hurt. Everything you do-the way you chew the side of your thumb when you're lost in thought, the faces you shoot me when we're out somewhere and you can't say what you really want to, the way you raise your left eyebrow when you're exasperated, how you hunch your shoulders in when you're tired-everything you do touches something in me and I'm awed and overwhelmed at the miracle of you loving me back." I touch Paul's precise handwriting, take a deep breath as I read his words. I know I don't love him the way he loves me, but I want to. I wonder how long it took him to write the letter. I wonder if he wrote it more than once, revised it until it was perfect, or if it just came out of him that way. He'd pressed it into my palm a week earlier, told me not to read it until I got home. I read it and it scared me. The intensity of it, the intensity of him scared me. Scares me. But I read it over and over again until I'd memorized his words, until I fell asleep with it still in my hands. My father had torn my room apart looking for this one sheet of paper. It's the only proof of my secret. He didn't find it. I won't let him find it. I look down at it and think maybe I should rip it into pieces, throw it away, burn it, but I can't, even if I do know it by heart. Nobody'd ever written me a love letter before. I can't imagine that I'll ever get one like it again. I fold it back up and tuck it gently into my pocket. I don't know where I'll put it, but I'll find somewhere safe. I open my bedroom door and head to the kitchen. My father's sitting at the kitchen table looking down at his coffee and Rebecca is standing at the counter gazing out the window over the sink. "You ripped it apart," I say softly. My father looks up at me and I can see that he's been crying. It twists something awkward inside me. He's supposed to be the bastard, here; he's not supposed to cry. "You ripped it apart, so you put it back the way it was," I say. "Where are you going?" he asks as I walk towards the door. "Mark's," I say. I wonder if he knows it's a lie. "Adam," he says. I keep walking. "Adam, just..." I turn and look at him. "I'm sorry that I..." He takes a deep breath. "I just need to know." "Know what?" "If..." He takes another breath. "If you're gay." I swallow hard. "No," I whisper. "No. How can you ask me that?" He looks away from me. "Fuck you," I say before I walk out the door. When I get to Paul's the house is quiet. I slip up the stairs and into Paul's room. He's sprawled across his bed, one arm hanging over the edge, his long legs stretched out past the end of the mattress. It figures that he's still asleep. It's not even eight o'clock. I sit on the floor next to his bed and stroke his shoulder. There's a silver dollar sized spot of drool on the pillow spreading out from the corner of his mouth. "What do you see in me?" I whisper, leaning my forehead against his arm. "How can you be so sure of everything?" I get up and sit at his desk, flip open one of his sketchbooks and grab a pencil. I begin to write. "Dear Dad, I lied to you before. I am gay." I scratch it out. "Dear Dad, I don't know how to tell you this." I scratch it out. "What makes you think that after ignoring me my entire life you suddenly have the right to know who I am?" I rip the page out of the sketchbook and crumple it into a ball, toss it into the trash. I wonder if Annie's had the baby, yet. I wonder if it's a boy or a girl, what they're going to name it. I wonder if they ever fight. I can't imagine them fighting. When I close my eyes and try, all I can conjure up is an image of them trying to decide whether or not to plant turnips in the garden. I doubt they ever really scream at each other. I turn in the chair and watch Paul sleep. I try to pretend that we're living together, that we've got a house on the edge of town, that he's a painter and I'm...what I'm going to be when I grow up always escapes me. When people ask, I say that I want to major in business, but that's only because I don't know what else to say and it stops people from asking more questions. So we're living together in a house on the edge of town, and then what? We're the faggots that nobody will talk to. People make their kids promise never to get within half a block of our house, unless it's to egg it or throw rocks through the windows. We could move. It's not like we have to live in Iowa forever. I could go to Stanford. It's not far from San Francisco and Paul and I could be together there, right? They'll let us be together there, won't they? And then what? All I know about San Francisco is what I see in the clips on the evening news after each Pride parade, and I just can't see myself in a hot pink Speedo and feather boa dancing on the back of a float. I take the letter Paul wrote me out of my pocket and tuck it into one of his sketchbooks. It'll be safe with him. I go over to his bed and kiss his forehead gently. I walk home slowly. My dad and Rebecca have left for work by the time I get there. My room has been straightened up a little bit, but it's still mostly a mess. I know it was probably Rebecca who put my bed back together, stacked my clothes on top of it, stood my trophies back up on my dresser. I have almost 700 dollars in cash in the Bible on my bookshelf. I put 300 dollars in my wallet, roll the rest up and stuff it down in my sock. I stuff a pair of shorts, a t-shirt, and clean underwear into my backpack, plus a collection of Stephen King short stories I haven't had time to read, my discman, a few CDs. I'm not sure how to get where I'm going. I consider hitchhiking, but in the end I pick up the phone. "Laura, it's Adam. Um, could you drive me to Waterloo? My dad was supposed to do it, but he totally spaced. Yeah, I can be over there in just a few minutes." The bus station won't open until 11, but I figure after she drops me off I'll be able to find something to do until it's time to go.