Running for Home - 20. October 24, 2021

October 24, 2021

Ugh, teaching today was not the best idea. It’s Friday today. Why didn’t I just wait the extra day and then have the weekend to recover too? Guess I’m still a glutton for punishment, surprise, surprise. It wouldn’t be me if I didn’t do things the hard way. I’ve had a headache since the end of my first class, and ended up taking an extra painkiller when I took the next dose at lunch. They had a tarp covering the hole in the wall, which was annoying because whenever somebody walked by outside you could hear everything. At least they say the wall is going to be fixed by Monday.

Hank didn’t totally fuck up what I’d wanted the students to accomplish this week, so it wasn’t a big deal to get things on track. He also marked what they handed in while he was subbing for me. It was more than I expected from him, actually, since he’s hella busy with his mutant sciences research projects. He only teaches advanced placement calculus in the fall semester and advanced placement algebra in the winter semester to make room for that work; it wasn’t too much trouble to put his projects on hold for a couple days to help me out. He’s a good guy even if he’s so completely off in space with his science geekery sometimes.

I guess the most remarkable event of the day was that the firestarter kid from the fight earlier this week came to see me after classes were finished. His name is Daniel. He apologized for his part in what happened, especially for turning on me when I stopped his initial volley of fire. I told him he was forgiven, and that when I was his age I probably would have done the same thing in that situation. I told him it was tough for me being the gay kid back then. His eyes widened in realization and then he nodded, looking down at his feet. I told him about how I wasn’t out to anyone back then, and that I’d been in love with someone who didn’t feel the same way. Though in my case that someone was decidedly straight. Xi’an and Piotr weren’t out back then, either, so I naively thought there weren’t any other gay kids and I was terrified of what might happen if anyone found out.

He’s in love with the strong kid, Connor, but he doesn’t know what to do anymore. They weren’t initially friends when they both started here three years ago, but their groups had started to overlap during the summer and winter breaks. They and many of their closest friends were students with no home to go back to, at least not a welcoming one. Connor and Daniel shared most of their friends, but Daniel wasn’t sure what was going to happen now. They were both suspended, so they didn’t have any privileges, and were restricted from being anywhere but their rooms, the bathrooms, and down to the dining room for food until Monday next week. I guess he was breaking the rules to come see me, but fuck if I cared. I’m not going to bitch him out for having the balls to apologize to me. Apparently none of his friends have talked to him during meals since the fight on Monday and have left him no space to sit at their tables. No one had come to ask him if he was okay. His roommate Adam has completely ignored him and in a further bit of dickish insecurity he is now leaving the room to change his clothes.

I sighed. Daniel’s got it tough now, that’s for sure. He was looking to me for answers, but I didn’t really have any. I told him that Jean-Paul is probably the better one to ask about what it’s like to be out in high school. I told him that it might be tough right now to deal with people’s reactions to him and the whispers and the gossip mill, but this whole incident will be yesterday’s news within a couple weeks. I told him that he needed to tell us immediately if he was being harassed, no matter how innocuous or petty it seemed. It was not in any way cool or acceptable and the other little shits around here needed to understand that. I told him not to be a hero about it, because this shit all adds up. It slowly eats away at your soul over time. I also told him that if he ever started to feel like everything hurt so much that he couldn’t stand it anymore, couldn’t go on, that he needed to come find me or JP immediately. Or anybody else on staff he felt comfortable with. I don’t want him to become just another gay kid who got so depressed that they ended things.

It was Connor, though, that was the big issue for Daniel right now. First of all, thank God those two aren’t roommates because that would have just added another layer of hell into all of this. It was bad enough for me living with Bobby, and Bobby didn’t know how I felt. Daniel and I talked a little bit about how much it can hurt to have such strong feelings for someone and they don’t return them. Or, perhaps in this case are too scared to return them. I asked him if he was angry enough about the whole situation to let Connor go. He said no, because he knew that regardless of what Connor felt deep down, he was acting out of fear. We talked about what was realistic, given the situation. We talked about how, even if Connor does return his feelings, it may be a very long time before he’s willing to come out, whether just to himself or more broadly to those around him. I also told him that he has to be prepared to let go. Connor might, in fact, be hetero, or maybe just a bit heteroflexible, and this really was just some private experimentation on his part. I mentioned that it was Connor’s choice whether or not he would let himself be in a relationship with another guy, no matter how stupid or deluded that kind of choice may be. I tried to make Daniel understand that a few acts don’t necessarily mean a person’s sexual orientation is one thing or another. Sex can be just getting off, and it can feel good even if the partner isn’t someone with whom you’d want to form a deep, meaningful relationship. Hell, it can feel amazing if the chemistry is right. A hole is a hole, as they say. I didn’t want to go too deep into these things, but I think Daniel got what I was saying.

I asked him how he felt about being outed. He said he was scared shitless, mostly, but he said there’s a part of him that also feels relieved. It’s like… now he doesn’t really have to do it himself, because everyone knows. He doesn’t have to go along with the discussions about girls and feel awkward and stay silent or just lie through his teeth just to fit in. He doesn’t have to deal with girls trying to get with him, to deal with the temptation of dating one of them just to fit in. He doesn’t need to worry about hiding the truth anymore. He’s also hoping that, if things just aren’t going to work out with Connor, that being out will make it easier to find a boyfriend who won’t be scared to be with him.

I told him to not get his hopes too high. There are definitely other gay kids in this school – Victor in my afternoon Lit class being one of them – but not too many. If the general population statistics hold for within mutants, there should only be somewhere between ten and twenty LGBTQ students in a school with about four hundred students. Maybe a few more than that, if we count the ones who fall on the relatively straight side of bisexual. Regardless, it’s not a whole lot of potential partners to choose from, especially considering nearly half of those twenty-ish kids will be lesbians. The chances of finding a good match, even for the short term, are pretty shit.

I asked him if he was planning on going to college and he perked up. I guess he wants to be a chemist and his grades are pretty good, so he’s going to be looking at some nice schools if he can keep his GPA up for the next few years. I told him university would be a wonderful experience because of generally tolerant campus cultures and just the larger sample size of people to date if he went to a big school or to one located in a major city. Two and a half more years of high school is a long time, though, and tenth grade can be pretty rough. It sure was for me. I told him he could come and talk to me about things whenever he needed to. I actually meant that, too.

I keep surprising myself with all of this teacher/mentor bullshit. Maybe it’s not as bullshit as I thought when I was Daniel’s age. I was pretty damn angry with the world and had enormous trust issues thanks to my parents. Maybe now I’m starting to see why the mentorship side of things was so important to Xavier and Magneto, beyond it just being an element of their selfish hubris to plant the seeds of their causes within young peoples’ brains. I don’t know. What I do know, though, is that Emma was right that this school needs to have another Big Gay Talk sometime soon. I just wish it didn’t have to be with Bobby at my side.