He slowly peers over his shoulder.
I retreat from the curtain, wide-eyed and holding my breath.
Another agonizing moment of stillness passes.
“Well, if you hear from Lance,” Chad tells them, “can you tell him I’m lookin’ for him? I think he …” Chad lets out a sigh, then his voice deepens. “… he might be interested in what I’ve got to say, if he wasn’t so dang insistent on hiding from me.”
I sneer at the curtain, annoyed.
“Oh, I’ll tell him,” Nadia promises him. “I … Well, once I … I mean, once we … Once someone finds him. Somewhere else. In the place where he is. Wherever that is.” She clears her throat.
A few footsteps take Chad away from the changing rooms. “I’ll see you all at the reunion tonight. You’ll look sharp, don’t worry one bit. Hmm.” He stops somewhere. “You choosing between them two? I’d go with the red ones.”
Then with a ringing of bells, I hear Chad depart the store.
As if gasping for air and dying of claustrophobia, I explode through the curtains, then find myself faced off with Mindy, Billy, and their completely-at-a-loss friends, all of them with questions pouring off their faces.
I address it all with an exasperated sigh. “Really? You have to ask? It’s Chad. Don’t you remember our history? He was a bully to me in high school, and he actually had the gall to apologize to me for all four years of torment over a couple of beers last night.”
Mindy and Billy share a look, unsure what to say.
Nadia—who looks a hundred times better in her yellow satin top than the thing she was wearing before—is the one to break the silence. “I don’t want to step anywhere triggering for you, and I know we don’t know each other too awfully well, but having lived here these past ten years, I can assure you, beyond a shadow of a doubt … Chad is not the same obnoxious jock we both knew back in high school.”
“It’s true,” puts in Elissa with a wistful sigh. “He is basically Mr. Tucker’s top supplier of beef now. And he regularly donates to the church, I heard.”
“A good Christian boy,” agrees Whitney mildly, nodding.
“Not to mention he’s gorgeous as fuck,” mumbles Mindy.
Billy and the others stare at her, stunned.
Mindy looks at each of them, annoyed. “What? He is! It’s not like I’m gonna ditch Joel for him. Y’all need to stop looking at me with those looks on your faces, judging me. Joel and I are very, very happy, and I am a woman, and I can state when someone’s hot.”
Nadia puts a consoling hand on Mindy’s shoulder. “Friend to friend. Woman to woman. My dear, how the hell long has it been since you’ve had sex with your husband?”
Mindy gawps at her, sputtering.
The question goes unanswered as I face Billy, tossing aside all of their (annoying) praise for Chad, and get to the point. “I needed someone else in high school,” I tell Billy directly, trying my very best not to raise my voice. “Someone else to be bullied instead of just me. Someone else to share my pain. Someone else to confide in—a guy who knew what it felt like. And that someone should’ve been you.”
“Should’ve been me??” Billy exclaims, beside himself. “You wanted me to get bullied??”
“But you were hiding all four years of our high school career,” I go on, making my point. “In plain sight, I might add. No one had any illusions about you. They knew you were gay. But you just had this … dudely way about you. You were everyone’s ‘little bro’. You weren’t Spruce’s shining homo, not like I was. Girls loved you. But guys loved you, too. And I …” My fingers have balled right up into fists despite my best efforts to stay calm. “I couldn’t stand you.”
My words visibly wound Billy. His face is quickly twisting with anger, growing more indignant by the second.
“You made me feel so fucking alone, Billy. Why did they only come after me? Was it for some other reason? Was it not even a gay thing at all? Was it because I was too girly? Was it my long hair? Was it just because I was a more obvious choice?” I come right up to his face. “Why didn’t you do anything at all about it? Why did you let that happen to me, someone as gay as you were?”
Billy’s jaw tightens so much, I can almost hear the grinding of his teeth. He tries to say something, but his voice falters. Then, with a short and jagged breath, he mutters, “You’re blaming me? For what you went through?”
A grudge can be a slippery, unreliable weapon.
Especially when you forged it during your teenage years.
It doesn’t sit right in your hand as an adult, no matter how you hold it. Yet something deep inside you—something that feels owed—it keeps urging you to brandish it. The weapon convinces you that your whole being has been somehow defined by it, and without it, you wouldn’t know who you are.