Game Changer, page 15
I made one final plea to the coach.
“One play, that’s all I ask!” I begged. “I’ve learned my lesson. Please don’t humiliate me by not putting me in at all.”
“Just sit down and wait,” he said. And so I did. I waited through one more T-ville touchdown. I waited through play after successful play that made Layton look like a god, and the only consolation was that he’d end the game in a good mood and would have nothing to take out on Katie.
Then at the two-minute warning, the coach put me in. Not as nose tackle, but as right end. That was fine with me. It was on the line, and that’s all that mattered. I had one chance to do this, and one chance only. I couldn’t screw this up.
The ball was snapped. I launched forward with worlds—literally worlds—of determination. I crashed through the Storks’ weak offensive line. Their quarterback was fading back for a pass, and I hurled myself at him, screaming. I made contact and—
Wham!
I was sliding. Ice in my arteries. Vertigo making my mind reel.
It was all happening between the smallest fractions of a second, but I stretched it. I made time move sideways instead of forward.
And I saw things I hadn’t seen before.
There was a pit. I was skating around it, always on the verge of losing my balance and falling in. Instinctively I knew if I fell in, that would be the end. Either of me, or of everything, or both.
And around me what I was sensing, it wasn’t as simple as cheeseburgers or emojis. There were pulsating shapeless things fighting for space, making it clear that these realities, all struggling to exist, were in some way alive.
Some were malevolent. Some were benign. I could sense familiar ones, but they were being forced out. To reach them I would have to squeeze between others and risk slipping into that pit. And the others, they were grabbing me, clinging to me like octopuses—and the second I imagined that, that’s exactly what they became. Millions of octopuses suffocating me, reaching for me, ensnaring me.
Then one reality loomed before me. It was neither bad nor good, light nor dark. It was curious. It desperately wanted to know what it would be like to exist. I could sense that this reality carried with it great and far-reaching change. I didn’t know what that change would be, but it was clearly not a boomerang reality. It would take me even further away from the world I knew.
It took hold of me, longing to envelop me, but I would not let that happen. I would not be passively consumed by yet another unknown, opaque world. I would control this. It wouldn’t devour me; I would devour it.
So I threw my arms around it, embracing it. I pulled it in. For a moment I felt like a soldier throwing himself on a grenade. But instead of detonating, it relaxed. It curled in upon itself, settling deep within me, happy to have a place. I felt its contentment. Its relief. Its joy at finally being real.
I opened my eyes.
I was on the turf. The coach was looming over me.
“Ash, look at me,” he said. He held out his index finger and slowly moved it back and forth. “Follow my finger,” he said. I did. He seemed satisfied. “Can you sit up?”
I did, but the world swirled around me. My brain felt like an angry zit about to pop. I couldn’t think clearly, much less access whatever memories filled this world. I took a few moments. The world stopped spinning. I stood up, digging my cleats into the turf. I kept my balance. Bit by bit, I took in the things around me.
The Storks’ quarterback was still down. Out cold. They had taken off his helmet. His coach and trainer were kneeling, taking his vitals. I realized I hadn’t just taken him down, I had taken him out. Had I killed him? Had I hit him that hard? For a terrible moment I thought that I had—but then he groaned, and his eyes fluttered.
My coach let out a shuddering breath of relief, then he looked to me. “Never seen a sack like that,” he told me, but he didn’t sound all that pleased. “Damn, Ash—it’s the freaking Storks. I’d never tell you not to play your best . . . but was that really necessary?”
They asked the semiconscious quarterback to move his hands, then his feet. They asked him a few questions I couldn’t hear, then they finally helped him up and off the field to the obligatory applause.
The coach motioned for me to leave the field, too. “Go see the trainer,” he said. “Have him check you out. Concussion protocol. You know the drill.” The coach had promised me one play, and that’s what I got. The Storks put in their second-string quarterback, and the game resumed.
On the sidelines, the trainer deemed me fit, but told me to take it easy over the weekend and look for signs of concussion. Like the headache I didn’t tell him about. Once he left, I tried to ignore my pulsing head and look for the changes. The inconsistencies. But everything looked exactly the same as it did before. There was still a sea of white faces in the stands. Damn! If something was different, I couldn’t see it, but I knew for a fact that something had changed.
I knew because when I looked at the Edwards sitting in the stands, there weren’t three of them. Now there were four.
Who we are is defined by a whole lot of things. Our family, our friends, our genetics, all the good things that have happened to us, as well as the traumatic things. And although we’re always redefining ourselves, some things are constants. They are part of who we are and don’t change. Unless, of course, you’re shifting between universes.
I was wary after the game, looking at everyone, trying to decipher what the change was, and relying on what little power of observation I had to pick out the inconsistencies. There was still not a single thing I could see, hear, taste, or smell that was any different from the previous world.
But I could feel something was different.
I knew this was not like the other reality shifts. In those I fell into each new world, rather than it falling into me. My trip through Elsewhere left me feeling fried, and my thoughts were sluggish. It was hard to think, hard to reason, and whenever I tried, I got dizzy. I wouldn’t tell the coach about it, or my parents, because it wasn’t the kind of concussion that anyone could do anything about. My brain was now crammed with yet another set of latent memories I had not unpacked. I would take it slow, I decided. I’d let the world present itself to me in its own time.
Once more I went home alone, skipping the locker room banter, and this time Norris didn’t bother coming after me. I hadn’t spoken to him much this week. I hadn’t hung out with the usual group of friends at all, because Leo wasn’t a part of that group anymore. My best friend in this world, Josh Easley, wondered what was up with me, and yeah, I did have memories of our friendship, but I felt I had to distance myself from them.
When I started my car, that bland music blared at an embarrassing volume. I turned it off. The parking lot was now a crawl of a hundred cars trying to get out the single exit all at the same time. I didn’t see the Edwards. They probably scooted off on their “skateboards.” Or maybe they were still here looking for me. I wasn’t ready to check in with them, because I didn’t want them to grill me. I was in no state for a mental barbecue right now—I just wanted my nice hot EMP bath, in my nice quiet bathroom, because as much as I wanted to know what this world had in store, I also didn’t want to know. I had failed to move things back toward home, and that was enough to grapple with for now. Maybe I could, for once, just sleep on it. Maybe the world would come to me in a dream and I’d wake up without a headache, knowing all I needed to know to make it through this next week.
My car inched along in the crush of vehicles, crippling my smooth escape. There were some spectators in Storks shirts meandering in front of me, taking their time in getting to their car, like they weren’t in the middle of a parking lot. There was a guy in shorts even though it was too chilly for shorts. Nice calves. Probably a speed skater, or some other ballistic sport. Good hair, too. I tapped my horn in a non-rude kind of way to get him and his girlfriend to step aside. I spared a glance at them in the rearview mirror after I inched past just long enough to note that, in spite of the hair and calves, the guy was not much to look at from the front. All zits and Adam’s apple.
Once out of the lot, the drive home was grueling. It seems like I hit every single blue light on the way. Then when I was finally home, even before I could go upstairs, the doorbell rang.
I checked the peephole, figuring if it was someone I didn’t want to see, I could silently back away and just ignore them. I could pretend I was already in the bath. Turns out it was Paul at the door. Although I really didn’t feel like being around anyone right then, I found I was kinda glad to see him. So I opened the door.
“Hey,” he said. “Just checking on you. That was one hard hit you took—you okay?”
“I didn’t take the hit, I gave it,” I reminded him.
“Well, either way, you were almost down for the count.” He stepped in and glanced around. “Where is everyone?”
“Not home yet.” I figured my parents and Hunter stopped on the way to get takeout.
Paul closed the door behind him. “Good,” he said with a smirk. Then he leaned into my airspace like airspace was something we shared, and kept on leaning closer until there was no airspace between us at all.
I’m going to pause here and give you a chance to process this in a way that I could not at the time. Take a moment. Take another moment. Get over it. Now let’s continue.
The kiss pretty much laid waste to my brain. It was the master key opening up all the doors of this world at once, and I was overwhelmed. I froze completely, unable to move. A part of me was screaming, What the Fuck? What the Fuck? I don’t want this! But another, more immediate part of me was screaming, Hell, yeah, you do want it; in fact, you’ve been waiting for it all day.
Memories of this world came surging through, and I knew if I tried to resist them, I’d drown in the floodwaters, like this was the tsunami my school was no longer named for. I found that my arms had come up involuntarily to hold Paul, and I wasn’t pulling away.
This is not who I am!
This is who I am!
I am not enjoying this!
Oh, man am I enjoying this!
And the part of me that was not into other guys got smaller and weaker, as the part of me who was totally into other guys took over—and both parts realized that the only way to survive a tsunami was to surf it. So I kissed Paul with such force, we both stumbled back against the closed front door.
“What’s gotten into you?” he said with a grin. “I gotta catch my breath.”
Fair enough. So I let him breathe a little before I went in again.
13
Ignorance is a Cockroach
Here’s what I know:
When I was nine, I had a crush on one of my classmates, but never told him. Actually I had a few crushes in grade school. Never on my friends though. It was always some kid I really didn’t know all that well and was a little too scared to get to know. I guess I was too young to put much mental energy into wondering what that was all about—or maybe I did kinda know but chose not to think about it.
When I was twelve, I would sometimes get a hard-on in the locker room. I was good at hiding it though. No one ever noticed, or if they did, they didn’t say.
When I was thirteen, I started to get the full picture. I liked guys, which meant I was probably gay. And if I wanted to be like all my friends, I had to pass for straight. It wasn’t too hard because I was the kind of masculine gay guy that the previous version of me was too ignorant to know existed. The hetero me thought that being gay meant you acted a certain way and talked a certain way—and since there was plenty of ignorance to go around, I was able to pass for straight all these years—and I naïvely thought that if I pretended long enough, it would become real. That the gayness was just a phase that would go away.
But of course it didn’t.
When I was in ninth grade, I made out with a friend the night before he moved away. I think we both felt safe going for it, because if it went wrong, we’d never see each other again anyway. He couldn’t out me, and I couldn’t out him. We wouldn’t have to look at each other in the hallway every day. So by fifteen years old, I was feverishly furnishing that closet I’d be in for the rest of high school.
Then in junior year, Paul started tutoring me in math. After we got to know each other, he took a chance and told me he was gay over a particularly difficult algebra problem. I told him I was cool with that, and we went on to solve the equation. Two weeks later I confided in him that I was, too, and the rest was history. I think he was closer to being out than I was, but he wasn’t there yet. Actually, I think he might have come out if it hadn’t been for me. I didn’t want him to be, because it might out me, too. I know that was selfish. I’m not proud of it. Even though I’m brave in some ways, there are other ways that I’m not. And being an openly gay athlete requires the kind of bravery I didn’t have.
I think Paul and I were in love. I say “think” because it’s a hard feeling to nail down. Especially because the feeling was so weighted down with other baggage. Fear of what my parents would think; the irrational belief that this gay thing might still go away; anger that I didn’t fit the mold I thought I was supposed to; and confusion about what my future would hold. But when Paul and I were together, with no one else around, all that went away. That’s why I thought it might have been love.
Even so, I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around it. I mean, I couldn’t even use the word “boyfriend” in my own head, much less out loud. How messed up is that? The closest I could come was to say that Paul and I were “buds.”
And so in this reality, Paul and I found times and places to be together in secret. Places where we could leave the rest of the world out of it and pretend it didn’t exist.
So back to the two of us making out in the foyer. In previous worlds, when Paul was just my math tutor, it had never occurred to me that he was kind of hot. Now it was obvious. How could I have missed it? Inside I was feeling maybe every possible human emotion all at once, the good and the bad. I felt like a power plant struck by lightning. All that flaring, buzzing energy shooting down high-tension wires too feeble to handle it. I was melting down.
Then I heard the garage door grinding open. That was perhaps the only sound that could make us stop. I finally broke off the kiss. “I . . . uh . . . gotta take a shower,” I told Paul.
“Better make it a cold shower,” he joked.
“Very funny.”
I went upstairs and heard my parents and Hunter coming in, saying hello to Paul, just as I closed the bathroom door. To them, he was still just my friend and math tutor. I had gone to great pains to make sure they had no reason to think otherwise.
I hadn’t brought up any of the ingredients for the EMP bath, but now I didn’t want to take one anyway. It would be rude to Paul if I just disappeared upstairs for the better part of an hour. So I did what I said I would do: I took a quick shower, and for the life of me I can’t remember whether it was hot, cold, or somewhere in between, because my mind was somewhere else entirely.
I wasn’t faced with a world that was different from the previous one, was I? The world, awful as it was, didn’t change this time. Instead, it was me who was different—and flashing through my life with this new lens wasn’t easy. All the lies I had told, all the things I’d pretended to be. And shame. Not shame for being gay, but shame for being unable to embrace it. Too much of a coward to say it out loud.
“Someday you’ll be ready,” Paul had told me. “You’ll come out at your own speed, and that’s okay. Everyone has to do it on their own terms.” And then he had added, “When you come out, I will, too.”
Which just reinforced the fact that I was the one holding him back, even though he didn’t see it that way.
When I came downstairs—wearing jeans and a shirt that Paul once said looked good on me—Paul was sitting with Hunter in the family room, watching TV. Some sitcom that I don’t think existed in the world I started from, but just as unfunny as most of the ones that did.
“Why are you just standing there?” asked Hunter. “You’re freaking me out.”
So I sat down next to Paul, obsessively aware of the buffer zone I put between us as we watched bad TV.
There’s something to be said about the communal experience of staring at a screen and allowing it to collectively empty your minds. It didn’t exactly unscramble my thoughts and emotions, but it numbed them just a little. It was comforting just silently sitting next to my brother and my boyfriend—and yeah, I’ll say the B-word now, even though I wouldn’t say it then.
“Are you staying over, Paul?” my mother asked, half an hour later. “Should I make up one of the guest rooms?” It was less of an invitation than my mom’s polite way of suggesting that it was time to leave.
Paul tossed me a poker-faced glance and said, “Naah, I’d better get home.”
Other friends often did avail themselves of the guest room option, but never Paul. Maybe he was always waiting for me to make the invitation—but I never had. The thought of him just down the hall would keep me up all night.
As I thought of this, my straight self surfaced for a moment and groaned with mournful nostalgia for the girls I’d dated, or at least fantasized about, and all the desires that had dropped off this new, unfamiliar horizon. I remembered what it felt like, but the actual feeling was gone. It was like I had taken one of those Mberries that totally altered your taste buds, but instead of just your sense of taste, the change went down to your very nature. What used to be bitter was now sweet, and what was once sweet had no flavor at all.
As I saw Paul to the door, he said, “You’re still looking kind of off. You sure you’re okay?”
“Just tired,” I told him. “I’ll be fine.”
“So . . . math on Sunday?” he asked. “Usual time?”
I offered him a slight grin. In all worlds Paul tutored me on Sundays. Even here, those sessions were actually about math.
“See you then,” I told him. We fist-bumped a goodbye but held our knuckles together longer than a fist bump usually lasts. It’s amazing how much your knuckles can feel when you really want them to. Then he went to his car and I closed the door behind him, the old part of me relieved, and the new part already missing him.
