"Save or Sacrifice"

[Agincourt]

This discussion is about the story Save or Sacrifice, a 5-chapter story in the High School section.

 

If you have not read the story you might not want to read this message because it may contain spoilers.

 

This one certainly rates high on the angst-o-meter, but I found myself confused/perplexed by the arc of the story.

 

Cory (the first-person narrator) introduces himself as a 16-year-old who has been involved with his high school gay club for two years, which he says has helped him tremendously.

 

It really means a lot to not feel alone. I had no idea what it was like until I tried. I think our counselor, Mr. Harris, saw a certain confidence in me these days. I saw a new confidence in me too. Maybe it was all the sex I was getting, hehehe! But he trusted me with the new guys and knew that I could warm them up a bit to the group over time. That's probably why he thought I would make a good partner for Ben that first day.

Ben, as it turns out, is a naive, innocent, and painfully shy kid, a year younger than Cory, who Cory takes under his wing and helps to be more comfortable with his sexuality. Ben develops a crush on Cory, which evolves into more of a big brother-little brother relationship, and then best friends.

 

In due course, Cory persuades Ben to attend a dance where students from another school also attend. At the dance, Ben meets a cute kid named Chandler. Ben and Chandler hit it off, and start hanging out together, but for some (inexplicable to me) reason Cory is often in attendance as well. But Ben considers Chandler to be his boyfriend.

 

Chandler, however, decides that he is more interested in Cory (presumably because Cory is more sexually experienced and willing to do everything -- it's very sexy as described). Ben eventually finds out that Cory has been seeing Chandler behind his back, and everything blows up between Ben and Cory. Meanwhile, Cory is f*cking Chandler's brains out at every opportunity.

 

Here's where I become perplexed, however. Cory seemed to be fine with the concept of Ben and Chandler being boyfriends. Yet when Cory is busted, it suddenly turns out that Cory's true feelings were for Ben. And while Ben was (at least initially) feeling betrayed because Cory was shacking up with his (Ben's) boyfriend, depriving Ben of Chandler's affection, as later chapters unfold the real problem seems to be that Cory's having sex with Chandler deprived Ben of Cory's affection. But . . . I thought Ben and Chandler would have been the ones getting it on while they were supposedly boyfriends -- although we know from later story developments that Ben would almost certainly have said no to almost anything Chandler wanted to do with him. In a way it's not at all surprising that Chandler wanted to move on in order to find a genuine sex partner, given his obvious hormone overload.

 

Anyway, somehow the story evolves into Cory's heartbreak over losing Ben. Wise Mr. Harris poses a question to Cory that causes him to realize that Chandler represents hot sex but nothing else -- no real depth of personal relationship. So Cory dumps Chandler, which at this point is way too late to salvage his relationship with Ben. When Ben, meanwhile, finds another boyfriend who seems to want to move faster on the sex front than Ben is comfortable with, it eventually leads to a reconciliation between Ben and Cory. But then I have to ask myself -- given that Chandler was such a sex hound, why would he have spent any significant time with Ben in the first place, since Ben quite clearly wasn't willing to move into the kind of active sex life that Chandler routinely seemed to follow (as did Cory, based not only on what he was doing with Chandler but also on his comments about his extensive sexual activity made at the beginning of the story)? And isn't a little weird that Ben, while seeing Chandler, implicitly seemed to think that Cory couldn't see anyone else?

 

Anyway, I'm of course glad that Ben and Cory got together at the end. I was just confused about how the predicament arose in the first place.

 

A