Steamroller

And it hit me right then that I was leaving because my mother and stepfather had thrown me out for being gay.

Surreal.

Later, at the Cookseys’, I explained that I was working forty hours a week and could pay them myself for taking me in.

“You will cut that job down the middle to twenty hours a week,” Mrs. Cooksey instructed flatly. “Or you will quit altogether. This is your senior year of high school, Vince. Let’s see you enjoy it a bit.”

“School’s not that great,” I told her.

“Because you get bullied.”

I nodded.

“Well, that’s about to stop too.”

I had gotten picked on all four years of high school, beat up on more than one occasion, and even sent to the emergency room a couple of times with a broken nose and arm. After Matt bought a car our junior year, a 1979 Toyota Corolla Wagon—it even had wood paneling—he picked me up every morning and I didn’t get jumped walking to school anymore. After school, on the days Matt had to go straight to work, I either stayed late and teachers and other students walked me out, or I just got the hell out of Dodge too fast for anyone to notice. It was the jocks; they had to pick on the only gay kid in school. I think it was a requirement for them to graduate. But no matter what, no one was ever going to tell me, like those guys who hit me tried to, like my mother and stepfather did, who I could and couldn’t love. I was a boy who liked boys; everyone would just have to deal.

I was stunned when Mrs. Cooksey went to school with me the next day. She sat with my principal, Mr. Cardoza, for an hour, and when they finally came out, her eyes were narrowed and cold and his were huge and terrified.

Not everything changed after that at school, and the online crap, the cyberbullying, that never went away, but the overt physical threat disappeared. I didn’t get pushed or shoved or grabbed anymore. The name-calling went on, and the crap that got written on my locker still got written, but suddenly there was a janitor there to clean it off. I didn’t have to do it myself. And being tripped, shoved, smacked, or bumped, that went poof into the ether.

“You’re amazing,” I assured Mrs. Cooksey a month later.

“I’m a mother,” she said. “And I wish I could fix all of it, and by the time Jaci gets to high school, I hope the groups I’m forming and the ones I’m joining will make this sort of crap obsolete. But we all have to be involved, and I am.”

I shrugged. “Jaci likes boys, I think.”

“So? Just because Jaci likes boys, I’m not supposed to care about some friend of Jaci’s I don’t know yet who’s going to love girls even though she is one?”

“No, I—”

“Hmmm?”

“No, ma’am.”

There was a long silence as we sat there at the kitchen counter on barstools side by side.

“Something on your mind?”

I cleared my throat. “Gary, he says I’m going to hell ’cause I’m gay,” I confessed to her. “And Mom, she’s just not sure. The church says it’s a sin to love a man.”

“Really?” She was aghast.

“If you’re gay.” I smiled at her, getting the joke.

“Oh, if you’re gay.” She drew out the word. “I was confused.”

I was really crazy about her, and her hugs before bed, and the way she yelled at you to pick something up just as you were about to do it anyway, and how she was a snarly beast before she had her coffee in the morning. She glowered at us and shuffled around before she would sit and sip, breathe in the aroma, and her narrowed eyes would open little by little.

That night, after my confession, she took my hand in both of hers and held tight. “Being gay is not a one-way ticket to hell, dear, you must believe me.”

I had no reason to doubt her.

“Talk,” she ordered. “You look weird.”

“Are you at all worried that I might attack Matt in the middle of the night or something?”

She snorted out a laugh. “No, dear, that never even crossed my mind.”

It was so different from coming out to my mother and Gary. I was dumbfounded. There was no yelling, no hitting, no hellfire and damnation, and no being thrown out on the street. “What about Mr. Cooksey?”

“Oh no, I don’t think you’re going to attack Mr. Cooksey either.”

I groaned and she cackled.

“I’m being serious,” I stressed to her. “Is he worried about me putting the moves on Matt?”

“Yes, sorry, I know,” she said, chuckling. “And to answer your question, no. He doesn’t think you’ll attack his son any more than I do.”

“Okay.” It was a relief. “What about me being gay?”

“He told me to tell you—if the subject ever came up about him caring if you were gay—that homosexuality is not something he gives a crap about, but he won’t abide show tunes and would prefer they were not played in his house.”