The Year I Stopped Being Invisible - 15. Chapter 15

It was after 10:00 by the time I got home from Linda's house on Sunday night. Tynah had already gone to bed, and Rex was snoozing in front of the TV with Foxy curled up by his side, so sound asleep that his ears didn't even twitch as I entered through the patio door

Linda and I had gotten some good rehearsal in, and she had promised to pick me up the next morning so we could run through our Duet before school in the auditorium.

Linda had become almost like a sister to me in the weeks that we had known each other from practicing our Duet so often, and she sensed that I was not my normal self.

"Is something wrong, Rick?" she asked, as we sat on her living room couch in between run-throughs.

I looked down at the carpeted floor, where Linda's cat Cougar was eyeing me suspiciously. I wanted to tell her what was going on, I really did, but I was afraid of what she would think. Instead, I answered with the practiced elision which every teen with a secret had mastered for centuries.

"I did something today," I said. "Something that I had to do, and now I'm worried it's going to backfire on me."

She nodded, concern plainly evident on her pretty face. "Rick, if you had to do it, and it's already done, there's no use worrying about it. What's going to happen will happen whether you worry about it or not."

I smiled wanly at her, getting to my feet before Cougar could gouge my hand with his swiping claws. Linda's cat loved one thing in life, and that was scratching human hands. The criss-crossing red lines all over the backs of Linda's hands were evidence of that, and I had already picked up a couple of battle scars myself from the grumpy feline.

"Let's run it again," I said, wanting to change the subject away from my worry over Taine's reaction to the note I had slipped under his door.

So we rehearsed some more until Linda's mother came home from her back-breaking shift at a downtown hospital, exhausted and obviously not in the mood for company.

That's when I jumped on my bike and came home, slowing down as I passed the Maxwell house, where I gazed longingly at the light in the second-floor window which I knew was Taine's bedroom.

I couldn't see into the room, but I wondered if Taine was reading my letter. Whether he had already read it and was composing a reply. Whether he had read it, ripped it up into a million pieces and flushed it down the toilet. Or maybe he had ripped it up and flushed it before reading it.

I saw Sly's red Lambo turn onto the street and pedaled away quickly, having no desire to see whether Ms. Ogretz was in the passenger seat and really not wanting to see them go into the house together.

Now, back at home, I tiptoed past Rex and Foxy and made my way quietly to my room, where I put on headphones and began listening to music on my bed, waiting for sleep to overtake me.

I've been holding out so long

I've been sleeping all alone

Lord I miss you

Maybe things would work out in the end. Maybe I would have my Taine back, one way or another, and maybe he even felt the way I did. Maybe he was just as scared and confused as I had been before mowing the lawn earlier that day had strengthened my resolve.

Or maybe I was completely fooling myself, as I have the tendency to do, and he was just utterly horrified and repulsed.

I've been hanging on the phone

I've been sleeping all alone

I want to kiss you

But, I told myself, he had kissed me too. I had kissed him, but the next night -- in his own room -- he had kissed me. That had to mean something. Sure it did. It meant that he was sad about his mom and that's it.

"He's not in love with you," the voice in my head told me. "Who could ever love you? Your own mother didn't even love you. She couldn't wait to get rid of you. Just like everyone else. Just like TAINE."

"Shut up," I mumbled to myself. "Go to fucking sleep."

And so I did, and dreamed of him.

Well, I've been haunted in my sleep

You've been starring in my dreams

Lord I miss you

* * * * *

True to her word, Linda was waiting for me in the driveway early the next morning. I jumped into the passenger seat of her bright yellow Chevelle and exclaimed, "Morning, sunshine!"

"Good morning, Rick," she said, a note of concern in her voice. "Is everything okay? What you were worried about, I mean?"

I shrugged. "Dunno. I'll probably know by this afternoon, though."

Linda frowned and sighed, pulling her car back out onto the street and heading toward school. I already knew that sigh, and could tell that my friend was going into maternal mode. Here it comes, I thought, but what she said next surprised me.

"Rick," Linda began, "I want to know that you can tell me anything, and I will understand. Okay?"

I nodded.

"So is it Taine Maxwell?"

I started in my seat, and must have been staring at her in shock, because she grinned, throwing me a warm sidelong glance as she kept her eyes on the road. I had no idea she even knew who Taine was, let alone that I knew him too.

"I...what...how..." I stammered.

"Oh, Rick, Rick, Rick," she said, smiling indulgently. "A Duet partner knows things."

I laughed nervously, wondering if I should admit it or plead ignorance. I felt naked and exposed, as if I had been caught doing something shameful.

All of my lawn-mowing bravado from the previous day had withered on the vine, replaced in an instant by the embarrassment which came from years of societal disapproval and schoolyard insults.

"You don't have to say anything," she said, turning up Walden Road. "I see how you look when you sit together at lunch, when you get off the bus together, when you keep looking around in the hallways between classes. You're looking for him."

I could only nod, fighting back tears.

"So what did you do, Rick?" Linda continued. "Did you tell him you loved him?"

That did it. On went the waterworks.

"Sort of," I managed. "I wrote him a note and slipped it under his door on my way to your house last night."

Linda chuckled, reaching across my legs to open the glove compartment and fish out a travel-pack of Kleenex for me.

"That was brave," she said. "And now you're worried he's going to tell everybody you're gay?"

"I'm not gay," I sniffled. "But Taine's..."

"Different," she finished for me. "I know he is. He's in my Geometry class. He seems so, I don't know, apart from everyone else. Like he knows things and thinks things that he doesn't think we could understand."

I paused from my nose-wiping to stare at Linda again, genuinely surprised by her insight. I couldn't have put it better myself.

"And he's beautiful," she said, flicking on the radio. "He's pretty enough that if you made him up, he'd be the prettiest girl in school. Except it's more than that...he's somehow like he's not from this planet. Like..."

"Like he's an angel," I finished for her. "Yeah, I know. I know."

In the days of my youth

I was told what it means to be a man

"Don't worry, Rick," Linda said, patting my knee reassuringly as she pulled into the school. "It'll all work out."

Now I've reached that age

I've tried to do all those things the best I can

I fell back against the seat as Linda circled the nearly empty early-morning parking lot. I wished I could believe her. I wished that I could, but I was filled with an existential dread at what the day would bring.

No matter how I try

I find my way into the same old jam

* * * * *

Linda and I rehearsed in the auditorium for about an hour, me fretting and she reassuring me between performances, and then the warning bell rang, signaling that we had ten minutes to get to our first classes. Linda raced off to her Spanish class, and I went to my locker to store my book bag and grab my English books.

There, on top of my books, was an envelope that had been slipped into my locker. On the front of the envelope was written "RICK" in a careful, cursive scrawl. My heart began to thud inside my chest, and I even felt a little ringing in my ears as I stared at the envelope...wanting to open it, but not wanting to open it. I tucked it into the inside pocket of my denim jacket, intending to read it when I wasn't in a hurry. I wanted to carefully consider whatever was written inside, whether it was good or bad.

It was then that I noticed a commotion further down the hallway. Students had crowded around near the door to Mrs. Colby's classroom, shouting and excited. A few more students rushed past me, and I knew there was a fight about to happen. Voyeuristic as anyone when it came to school fights, I hurriedly closed my locker and ran over to watch.

The first person I saw was Kevin Gorman. Kevin was a tall, muscular junior on the football team, and pretty much the biggest bully in school. I smirked, knowing that whoever was on the opposite side of the growing circle of students was in really big trouble. Kevin was a complete idiot, and wore a perpetually slack-jawed look on his dumb potato face, but there were two things he did quite well: sack quarterbacks and beat up underclassmen. It was clear that we were all to be treated to an example of the latter.

"Kick his ass!" someone screamed, the crowd's bloodlust rising in delirious arousal.

"Fuck him up!" another voice yelled.

I worked myself around to watch as Kevin moved in on his unfortunate prey. That was when my amusement turned to horror, for Kevin's target this morning was a very thin and scared-looking freshman named Taine Maxwell.

"Oh no," I whispered.

Taine had drawn fully inside himself, staring at the ground with his cap pointing straight down. His posture was deceptively relaxed, but the white knuckled hand clutching his English book in front of his slender abdomen told a different story.

With no warning, Kevin lunged toward Taine, causing him to flinch, then pulled up short and slapped the book from Taine's hand with one thick, meaty paw.

The book flew straight into Kirsten's sweater-covered tits, but did nothing to erase the fierce, animal excitement in her eyes or the feral grin on her thickly-glossed lips. I had always kind of liked Kirsten, but in that moment -- as the book fell to the ground and she pushed forward to be closer to this savage humiliation -- I hated her.

Taine raised his hands weakly and attempted to move around the larger boy, but Kevin faked a punch, making him flinch backward.

"Whatcha gonna do about it...TAINT?"

Someone kicked the book across the circle, then, and it bounced painfully off the toe of my shoe. I didn't care, because I was starting to see red.

I had been beaten and abused for much of my life, and one of the side-effects of that was what could charitably be called "anger issues."

I had a pretty long fuse, but when I saw something like this, the Incredible Hulk had nothing on me.

Taine was looking down at the floor again, and once more tried to charge past Kevin. The crowd was yelling and screaming wildly around me, but my focus was on the love of my life.

He's mine! my mind screamed. You can't hurt him!

Kevin laughed cruelly and slapped the hat from Taine's head, revealing the terrified face of my Taine, my angel, my Babes...

...And that was when I went berserk.

I don't remember what happened next, but a few minutes later, I was being restrained by the strong arms of Vice-Principals Wells and Kregar, Taine was looking at me in horrified awe, and the crowd of kids was hushed.

They were all staring at me too.

I didn't see Kevin. What I did see was quite a few splatters of blood on the floor, some of them smeared, one of them bearing part of a sneaker-print. Then I saw Taine's English book on the ground, or what was left of it. One corner had been flattened and looked as if someone had been using it to hammer bricks into a wall.

It was also wet with blood.

"Go to class, everyone!" Mr. Wells barked, and the circle quickly dispersed.

As it did so, I saw Kevin being taken out of the school on a gurney a long way down the hall by some very concerned- looking EMTs. There was a lot of blood.

Mr. Wells had me by one arm and Mr. Kregar by the other as they unceremoniously dragged me to the office. As we passed Taine, he still stood rooted to the spot, watching me being pulled away, his mouth hanging open in mute amazement.