Kicked Out

Kicked Out 3

Hi, I'm Michael (michael.wapshot@gmail.com), and I wrote this thing. Have another chapter!

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KICKED OUT

III. Satyricon

"Damn, it's freezing. You can't be staying outside."

My teammate Cavanaugh had trotted up the bleacher steps in one of those post-run bursts of energy, but he now halted halfway through his descent, right next to where I was sitting.

I shrugged, too weary to muster much conversation. Our cross-country practice had just finished, and Friday runs were the longest and toughest. Today's cold whipping wind, which stung and ached in your teeth if you mouth-breathed too much, hadn't helped anything. But of course I had the luck of always getting seriously overheated after I was done running, so now I was sitting around without my coat on. I'd barely mustered the will to change out of my track uniform, but I figured sitting still in this wind in shorts couldn't be healthy.

"Shit, you are staying," Cavanaugh said, taking stock of the math textbook I'd pulled out of my bag.

"Sick of the library," I said. "And of my roommate."

"Don't you ever have fun? It's a Friday for Chrissakes."

"Maybe I like the fresh air."

"C'mon, homework isn't getting fresh air," he said, stretching and surveying the straggle of hockey players warming up for preseason training. Almost half the team and reserves were mysteriously "out sick"; it was always hard to get players' preseason asses in gear for cold-weather sports when it hadn't even snowed yet. But naturally, Ender had shown up. And he was the reason I was there.

"Not much of a scenic view," said Cavanaugh with the self-assured bitterness of a straight guy with nary a short-skirted cheerleader in sight. (We did have cheerleaders, but they were of the old-fashioned "yell leader" variety.) I felt a fearful pang at Cavanaugh's words. I was wondering if I'd ever be so confidently dejected about Napier's sexual landscape again. And to think I would've probably sounded just like Cavanaugh this time last week.

I batted these thoughts away; I was trying to operate under a policy of not intellectually analyzing what I'd been doing with Ender. Part of me was still convinced that I didn't know why I was sitting in these bleachers, even though I did know. I wanted to be near Ender, and it wasn't because I'd developed an interest in hockey fitness regimens. I wanted to drink him in. Observe him in his preferred environment, try to make more sense out of him. Appreciate Napier's great blond hope. I also wanted him to see that I was here, watching him with loyal and interested eyes.

Or was I overthinking it? Maybe Cavanaugh had only been referring to the anemic gray sky and sad thinning trees. It was, after all, that certain week in November that always started out with decently full foliage and then got more and more bare-limbed with every blink. Degrees dropped by the day, and the wind got ever meaner.

But it was also tempting to indulge the absurd thought that Cavanaugh knew, that he'd been informed of what I'd been up to and was trying to torment me....

You have to understand the kind of paranoia we picked up in an environment like Napier. Going to an isolated boys' school somehow both concentrated the cultural homophobia at hand, and loosened the rules a little. Look, the winters were long up there. Long and cold. And maybe one night you'd get into a warm bed with someone when he was sharing his dirty magazines. Maybe you'd touch each other. And maybe that wouldn't be such a terrible, queer thing, so much as an understandable softening of boundaries. I'd never done such a thing--and any guys who had done it would never admit to it, obviously. But there was this unspoken understanding that if something like that happened, it wasn't a hanging offense. There was a wide gulf between a thing like that, and being a known homo.

There were a few known homos on campus, guys who just couldn't, for the life of them, suppress whatever inborn sissiness they possessed. So that was the derisible public face of homosexuality on campus--uncontrolled sissiness. The idea that there could be "passing" homosexuals walking among us was given no shrift; there was no other kind of homo but the pansy kind, and pansiness was nothing but mockable. Believe me, I used to think more or less the same way, although I was getting better about it as I got older. I can say that I was at least never mean to those guys. I felt sorry for them.

Then there were a couple of daring guys, the school freaks, who "flaunted it"--that is, were open about their preferences, and invited people to say something to their faces if they had a problem with it. There was Stuart Goff, an upstanding Napier senior who was into his second year of being the established homosexual of the class of '73. He was a well-spoken guy whom I liked, and would have been favorably disposed toward anyway because he was a fellow four-eyes. There was also this bantam kind of kid in the sophomore class, Roger Brabant, who'd been openly calling himself a queer since he was a freshman. I had to admire him some. He had moxie, that was for sure. But I did still think that both he and Stuart were completely off their rockers. They'd given the student body license to mercilessly harass and ridicule them in public venues, since Napier did not feel obligated to step in on the behalf of boys like that, not unless there was serious violence involved. The school would intervene if Bob Normal came to a dean and said someone had written "FAGGOT" across Joe Hetero's locker in permanent ink that no one could get off. But Napier would shrug if, say, Stuart Goff came to them with the same complaint about Roger Brabant's defaced locker, and might instead ask, more or less, if Roger had considered not being such a faggot. And then they'd probably tell Stuart to go buy a pot of paint if he really wanted the word covered up soon and not whenever the school got around to it at its sweet leisure.

Yet if our Roger Brabant had stayed in a glass closet--like, say, a poor, nervous senior named Danny Bly (who, God rest him, did not survive the '80s)--Napier probably would have been motivated to advocate for him. Danny, you see, was perpetually at war with his own undeniably sissy nature, and his doomed efforts at self-reform earned him administrative brownie points of a sort. Danny was, after all, trying his best to be normal.

But where was I? Right, yes, I was saying that there was a line of demarcation between total homos, and desperate straight guys who'd been victimized by their parents' choice to put them away in a boys' school in Nowheresville, New Hampshire. And that really, a bit of mutual exploration did not have to be the end of the world. That made you randy and sexually curious, not a fag.

And yet Napierans were nevertheless constantly trying to prove and affirm their raging heterosexuality. I supposed queer shit got scarier when it was understandable, when it was a tangible possibility, when it was a thing people might dare wonder if you're doing. As opposed to queer shit that was a faraway mystery--queerness that sent out hazy smoke signals of sexual predators, mincing, dishonorable discharges, Hellenic nudes, confirmed bachelors, and seedy bars or public parks. God, nothing about those mysteries of urban deviance and Greek freakishness seemed like they had anything to do with the way Ender and I had been playing around. But that was just it: if homo stuff became real to you, instead of something so bizarre you couldn't fathom it, what if you started forgetting how gross that shit was? What if you got tempted to try it? What if you tried it and liked it?

I wasn't sure how I felt about having tried it. The night following and the day after, I'd strolled around in some haze of rosy hormones. On Thursday I could feel myself slowly sinking down from that high, although I bounced back after meeting Ender for tutoring--which, on my suggestion, we quietly conducted in a public area of the library. I wasn't sure how much chemistry he actually learned, but I felt that his Latin was getting back on track, at least; that rote memorization technique of mine worked quite well with foreign languages. There had been something both torturous and relieving about knowing I'd sworn to keep Ender on task that night. Torturous, in that he sat too close with his knee bumping mine, he put his mouth right up to my ear to whisper, and by the second hour he'd gone right ahead and rested his hand on my thigh, just above the knee, and massaged me there from time to time under the table. God, my pants felt tight. And I found myself making conjugation error after conjugation error.

But knowing I couldn't respond to Ender did alleviate my anxiety, because there was no pressure to fret about what might happen, or to feel bad about my nonexistent sexual technique. As I knew it would, though, the anxiety struck with a vengeance as soon as tutoring was over. I felt a pressure front building on the horizon. I was starting to overthink. Was getting psyched out. Suddenly had a million stupid worries about what might happen next. I managed to clear my head with Kick Out the Jams; it was pretty hard to have coherent thoughts inside the MC5 thicket. ("Heinous," was Nat's comment when he walked in on his most hated of my records.) Finally I went to bed feeling calm.

But this morning I'd been beset by yet deeper anxiety. With Tuesday's lingering headiness almost gone, things felt strange. Like the world had shifted into a slightly different key, and I couldn't tell if I liked the new sound. Several unbidden voices had also popped up like mushrooms after rain, and I couldn't get them to go away.

My peers: You're a cocksucker now, Stockwell. You faggot.

Me: What the hell happened Tuesday night, anyway--does this mean I'm a homo?

My mother: What would your poor grandmother say? What would I say?! Your

father_? Not to mention Father Edwards at church...Father Brownell at school...!_

It'd also suddenly, truly clicked in my brain that I'd had--well, some kind of sex, anyway, for the first time. That maybe I didn't count as a total virgin anymore. That was pretty weird to think. I sort of wished I'd remembered that while it was happening. Instead it had all felt dreamlike and fast and unfolding faster than my mind could follow. Nothing like I'd ever pictured. Although of course I'd always had an image of mounting a girl in triumph, not of choking on cock while my knees started to ache. Shit, if you'd asked me before that night if it was even possible for someone to enjoy giving head, to get off on it, I would have said hell no. Those girls in the dirty magazines--I always thought it was fake, a pornographic trope, for them to look happy and turned on while they sucked guys off.

Cavanaugh brought me back down to earth when he let out a huge, thank-God-it's-almost-the-end-of-the-season sigh and sprawled himself a couple feet down the bench from me, head tilted back, eyes shut. Seriously? Damn it, who asked him to hang around? Now I was going to be on edge wondering if he could see that I was indeed taking in the scenic view of Ender doing his stretches.

But I forgot my annoyance when, at long last, Ender lifted his head during an arm stretch and spotted me. The broad beautiful smile he gave me made my heart thwack deep and full, the way a great baseball hit vibrates through your knuckles and tells you from the timbre of impact that the ball's going to sail away in a perfect arc. I couldn't have suppressed my big dopey smile if I tried. I could practically feel a Looney Tunes cartoon heart drift up from me and then pop with overexcitement.

Now Ender was holding his hands behind his head while he waited for the others to finish their stretches, leaning back to look up at the sky. This showed off his broad chest. And ah, his jersey was riding up. God, he was so well-built. He met my gaze again to make sure I was still watching. Oh, I was watching. My eyes were iron spheres and he was their magnet.

In fact, I was pretty distressed by how compelling I found him. I'd clung to some flimsy hope that I'd sit out here today and watch Ender and conclude that--beyond some strange but strictly in-the-moment sexuality--I didn't like him except as a platonic friend. That I'd affirm that I was only there to watch Ender dominate on the field, since to anyone who respected sports, his prowess was glorious. Inspirational. Same with his body; it was a matter of astonishment, not attraction. Yes, I'd thought perhaps I'd coolly examine Ender's technique from afar, and find that his body bore no significance to me except as a perfect tool--ah, let me reword that--as a perfect machine of athleticism. And his face would also mean nothing to me, except that I liked to see him smile, just as everyone liked to see him smile. I was here to support him as his friend. Nothing more, nothing less.

As for the stuff that was going on between us under the proverbial table? Getting our rocks off, that was all. Friendly helping hands and whatever. Maybe something like a crush, in the way grade schoolers get stuck on each other.

....

...Yeah, that was all desperate bullshit.

It'd gotten me through the morning with minimum internal angst, but it was such bullshit. Looking at Ender now, it was undeniable: I liked him. You have to hear that with the right inflection, you know, like I was a thirteen-year-old girl getting swoony after the big ol' seventh grade fall dance or some shit: I liiiked him.

And obviously that scared me beyond all hell.

Like I've said, funny things happen when you're deprived of your preferred sex. But getting swept up in pheromonal sexual instinct was to me very different from having tender, warm, nervous feelings in your stomach whenever you thought about someone. Whenever she--he--turned your way. It was the difference between wanting to touch someone despite their parts, and wanting to touch all of someone. Including and maybe even because of their parts. It was the difference between just showing up to get off, and wanting to be wrapped up in his arms. Wrapped up in his arms? What the hell was wrong with me?! That was preposterous, thinking about doing a girly thing like that with George goddamn Endicott.

But I couldn't deny that the thought of his strong arms around me held incredible appeal. Messed up, right? At least that's what most folks would've called it. At best. Although since when did I base my private choices on public opinion? Jesus. Screw it.

I cartoon-heart liked him, and I knew it.

God rest my poor hetero soul.

"...before second block?"

Cavanaugh, apparently, had been speaking to me.

"What was that?" I said.

"You think they'll have us leave before second block, you know, on Tuesday?"

He was talking about the cross-country championship.

"Isn't it at Deerfield?"

"Is it?" he said.

"Yeah, so that's what, ninety minutes on a straight shot down 91. No way."

"Damn it. I've got this French test, sure could use an extra night."

"Quel dommage," I said absently. My attention had locked onto a figure below. Not Ender. He and the rest of the hockey team were jogging around the track now, and I would've enjoyed watching, but my sights had latched onto that most elusive of specimens, Nagelschmidtus lawrentius. He'd come wandering out of the mixed hardwood grove that ran along the athletic fields, underdressed with his shoulders hunched and his hands jammed in his pockets, after what had to have been an unpleasant November stroll.

Lawrence was still steadfastly avoiding me, but I intended to catch him unawares.

"So what do you figure us for, think we can take third? Maybe?" Cavanaugh said, in reference to the cross-country championship, but I was already grabbing my things and scrambling down bleacher rows.

"Sorry, man, talk later," I managed to say, and bolted for the edge of the stands, coat half-on, bag slung precariously over one shoulder. At the railing, though, I paused, turned, waited to catch Ender's eye, and waved while incompetently miming something that suggested I had to leave in a hurry. I clocked his shrug and smile, then ducked beneath the railing and leaped to the ground not five feet behind Lawrence, feeling like a guerrilla fighter.

"Hey," I said with a grin, and Lawrence whipped around in surprise.

But then he just sort of worked his jaw and said, "Hi," sounding weary. Well, I'd be tired too if I'd spent a whole school-week running away from my friends.

I studied Lawrence with more attention than I might otherwise, taking stock of him with fresh eyes, and thought, Huh, maybe Nat was right. My friend's looks had been changing lately. And although Lawrence would always look unusual, slightly irregular...he was looking pretty good. Strong jawline, well-formed shoulders. Interesting high cheekbones. A smidgen taller than average, my height. A frame that would never exactly be large, but that was sturdy and well-apportioned. Bright eyes. Forever-tousled dark hair, no matter what kind of comb you took to it. I liked that, but his mom, and perhaps girls in general, did not approve. Not to mention if you got close enough you could see he had dandruff--so I wasn't sure if his hair counted or not.

In any event, I felt a rush of what felt almost like mother's pride, and said, "What's new, pussycat?"

It was an old joke between us, but Lawrence didn't crack a smile.

"Listen, I have to go, I...yeah." He didn't even pretend to finish as he started walking backwards toward the campus buildings.

"No you don't," I said, walking right up to him and then keeping pace at his side. "Jesus Christ, man, look, I know you're probably still worked up over, y'know, the thing from Sunday, but c'mon. Let's hash it out and get it the hell over with and then we never have to bring it up again."

Lawrence shot me a sideways glance of what looked like terror, and I grabbed his arm, forcing us to a stop by some old maintenance shed.

"Lawrence. Man. Get it together. Stop looking at me like I have a knife to your throat and listen for half a second. Jesus, you know I don't care, don't you? I don't give a shit about whatever I walked in on. O.K.? So let's move on."

He didn't say anything, still wasn't looking at me.

"Did you hear me or what?" I said.

"I heard. You said you don't care."

"Right. Therefore?" I said, and jogged his arm with affection.

"Why do people think saying things like that will make someone feel better?" Lawrence said to the sky. "Fine--you don't care. That doesn't mean I don't still care. Which I do, so--"

"So, what?" I said hotly, following his face with my own until he had to look at me.

"So?" he said. "So...so I'm ashamed."

"You think I'd judge you for a thing like that?" I almost said something about hypocrisy, but then remembered he'd have no clue what I meant. I knew I could've pulled the "me too" card on him as a reassurance, but I instinctively kept it in my sleeve. The Ender encounters felt sacred and unmentionable. Anyway, what worth could my assurance that there was nothing wrong with him hold, if he found out that I was only trying to convince myself of the same thing?

"Why not judge?" Lawrence said. He studied the mud on the toe of his leather shoe. "Who wants to be friends with some pervert--"

I scoffed. "You've got to be kidding me. You think I'd want to quit being friends? Go and push the button over some dry humping?"

Yes, his face said, and his eyes were like a sick dog's--both wanting and not wanting me to reach for my shotgun.

"Well forget it," I said. "That insults me, man. Jesus, I'd never drop you over that. I don't even think it's disgusting, let alone perverted."

I hesitated, fearing I shouldn't have said all that. Lawrence's eyes had narrowed with perplexity. Sure, I was known to be a leftist, cultured person who was wise to the diversity of human sexual proclivities, but that didn't mean it didn't come off as very odd for me to deny finding it gross.

"I mean," I said carefully, "what do I care what Bowie does backstage, you dig?"

Lawrence shrugged.

"Come on," I insisted. "Taking some action where you can get it hardly makes you a homo."

It had better not, or I was probably one twice over, considering I'd taken it and I'd liked it--liked it for its own sake and not simply as a substitute activity, for God's, uh, sake. Yeah, if there was a homo scale, I suspected I'd be scoring higher on it than Lawrence.

"I'm not one," Lawrence said. "I swear."

"That's what I just said."

"But it doesn't bother you? When we shared a room for years--" He dropped his voice, clearly expecting to scandalize me. "And that wasn't the first time, and it's not exactly...dry."

"Yeah, that's what Nat said--that's right, we talked. He and I share a room, too, or did you forget?"

"Oh," Lawrence said. He sheepishly rubbed the back of his neck. "Right."

"And I don't give a shit what my roommate does on his own time, just so long as it's on his own furniture. He and I are all good. But damn, Lawrence, if anything I'm offended you seem to spend more time hanging out with that schmuck--"

"Schmo," Lawrence corrected. I'd picked up some Yiddish from him, such that I sounded more like a New York Goy than a Bostonian, and there was schmuck and there was schmo, but one of them was in fact frightfully crude--and I'd be damned if I could keep them straight.

"Right. Schmo. Well, you seem to spend more time hanging out with that schmo than you do with me. It's O.K. if you don't want to hang out with me, but I'd appreciate if you could tell me to my face that that's what you want."

"No, it's not like that, not at all," Lawrence said, but failed to continue.

This annoyed the hell out of me, and he probably knew it, but he only pissed me off more by saying, "Sorry if--" and then stopping again.

But whatever. This was nothing new in the "Lawrence says nothing and continues to act as if my friendship is an affront to him," index. I swallowed my pique. Reminded myself that maybe his home life had gotten really messed up or something, like when his dad left, and he wasn't ready to say anything yet. This was my mantra of charitable interpretation.

I put my arm around him to show he didn't repulse me or anything. He allowed it. Then, grimacing, he turned to lean into me in a way he'd never ordinarily do, not in public anyway, his face pressing into my shoulder. This made me figure something was really wrong.

"You doing O.K., Lawrence?" I said.

He pulled away with his hands over his face, rubbed his eyes like he was trying to wake up, and let out a long breath. Then he moved right along and said, "So you still want to hang out with me?"

"If you'll let me, asshole," I said, in the New York way. Where fuck you means I love you, and buddy means you son of a bitch.

"How about right now?"

I had a lit mag meeting in half an hour.

"I dunno, man, I don't think I'm up for darts or whatever."

"No games," he said. "We can go up to my room if you want."

Well, this was a welcome change of pace. Lit mag was going to have to survive without me.

* * *

That evening it was like the old Lawrence was back, and no time had passed in between. We picked up about where we'd left off the day before he killed our rooming contract. Talking, laughing, dropping the stupid pretenses and masks that people wear in public. It was like soaking in pure relief.

But, I reflected, getting to my feet and surveying Lawrence's pea coat hanging on the back of the door, the pencils he'd handmade from tree wood, the drawings on the walls--it felt all wrong that his things were in a room that was not mine, a room half given-over to some sophomore's passion for the New York Jets.

I noticed that Lawrence still had some photos of us on display on his bulletin board and on his desk. When I'd packed for school this year, I'd left all those sorts of pictures behind. I didn't care to put them up, not after he ditched me as a roommate, and possibly (I'd thought) as a friend. I was sort of regretting that now.

I also saw that he'd put up a new piece on the wall since the last time I was in here: some wiry dark shapes against a background of brooding green. Lawrence was an artist. One with genuine talent, not simple skill. One who, at his tender age, was already developing a distinct aesthetic voice. However, he did not produce finished pieces with figurative subjects unless he was forced to, and to a lot of people, art people included, that meant there was something seriously wrong with him as an artist. I mean, not people who were actually on the scene--in fact, at the time, you'd practically be laughed at for producing figurative pieces. But at prep school, art was still landscapes and still lifes and whatever, and the head of the Napier art department certainly did not like Lawrence's abstract work. But Lawrence knew better than to listen to the guardians of mediocrity. He knew he was good. He'd won some huge contest when he was in the sixth grade that was supposed to be for juniors and seniors in high school, a stipulation he must have skimmed over. (He did that a lot--he could be spacey.) No one realized the error until a scrawny twelve-year-old, wearing one of his father's ties, showed up to collect the award. But he got the prize money anyway. And he got to meet Helen Frankenthaler.

His art teachers said he could have a big future ahead of him. The key word being could. The trouble with being an artist was that so much of it depended on sheer luck. And that was why Lawrence's father, while he was generally encouraging, would sometimes give little speeches about how Lawrence ought to take advantage of his aptitude for math and science and go pursue a reliable line of employment, and leave art to weekend fun. This was somewhat rich, given that Lawrence's father had pursued his own passion and entered academia, even though that could have easily gone sour too. I don't think he knew how seriously his son took his editorial speeches, though--and while Lawrence tried not to internalize this talk, of course he did. And so my friend claimed that he did not know what he wanted to do with his life. It drove me kind of nuts. As someone with an art drive, he did not know what it was like to have all the energy of a driving passion, but to lack any direction or sense of life purpose. Or what it was like--I at least did not have this problem--to lack any drive at all. He had no idea what a gift he'd been entrusted with. It wasn't to be trifled with, or thrown away.

Besides--it wasn't like Lawrence had a totally impractical set of artistic skills. No, his skills were very marketable, if he ever wanted commercial paychecks. He was in fact a talented realist, and spent a lot of time sketching and practicing technique and doing media exercises. But for his personal, finished pieces he only ever worked on these funny chalk and oil pastel abstractions. I supposed the closest point of comparison would be Klee or Miró at their most nonrepresentational. Sometimes Kandinsky. That's what I'd concluded from the art history books Lawrence lent me. I'd educated myself for his sake--after all, he'd sat through the explanatory comments I liked to yell, over my jazz and contemporary records, about music history and culture--but then I found genuine interest in the art, and could only wonder why I'd ever thought it a chore to look at pictures. I mean, what was easier than looking?

And I really liked this newest piece of his. There was just something to it. It reminded me of how I felt when I was first beginning to understand something alien to me, like when I knew I was on the right track to solving a math problem. This picture, I thought with a pang, belonged in my room. Along with the rest of Lawrence's things.

Then Lawrence came back from the bathroom, and I decided to break out the two 50 mL bottles of Bacardi that Ender had given me last night, just before we parted ways outside the library.

"Can you pretend this counts toward tuition?" he'd said, smiling as he slipped a cigarette into his mouth, bowed his head, and sparked his Zippo. Then he blew a ghostly smoke ring into the night air, and I said, "Neat," like a huge dope.

"Take up smoking and I'll teach you," he said, passing a hand over the small of my back as he breezed off into the dark.

"Want to split these?" I said to Lawrence now.

He did a double take. "Where did you get them?"

So I explained the Ender situation. Well, the relevant parts of the situation. The mundane parts. Given that I wasn't even sure I'd felt anything that time with the grass, I omitted that part too; it seemed a pointless anecdote. And even though Lawrence usually kept his mouth tighter than a bear trap when it came to secrets, I declined to mention that Ender was on academic probation, saying only that he needed to get his grades up pronto. In spilling about the probation when we barely knew each other, Ender had invested a huge amount of trust in me--and that felt like a gift of faith I couldn't bring myself to violate.

"Take one," I said of the bottles.

"I dunno," Lawrence said, rubbing the back of his neck.

This time I did the double take. Alcohol was among Napier's most valuable commodities, and it'd been very exciting last February when one of the track team seniors deigned to invite me to his birthday party. I brought Lawrence along and we got drunk for the first time. Other than the spins, it'd been quite fun. We'd both turned out to be happy, jokey drunks. Then we got drunk a second time last spring in Manhattan, on booze from Chinatown. O.K., so I hurled by the end of the night, but it was still a good time. And Lawrence hadn't gotten sick at all.

"I don't think I liked it much, those times," Lawrence said now, tugging nervously at his tie. He was always wearing a tie, even though the rather progressive Napier dress code--which had been adopted in lieu of uniforms the spring before we matriculated, in response to student protests demanding reform--did not mandate it except on certain occasions. He was also forever in nice button-downs, weekends included. Some law of the universe would've broken, it felt like, if he were to wear a t-shirt, or blue jeans, or sweats; even for P.E., which he had to take as an extra class twice a week after school, he only ever wore tennis shirts and sweaters. People did not read his investment in clothing as feminine, given the healthy faction of preps who'd been raised as natty dressers, but he did stand out in his disregard for both current trends and the whole WASPy khakis-deck-shoes-and-a-tasteful-blazer thing. Outside of his P.E. kit, he wore what he liked, and what he liked were patterned socks and ties, unusual color combinations, and tailored outerwear. It was sort of Mod-inflected, and when I first met him I thought he was trying to look like a Davies brother, especially with the way his hair had been and all, but it turned out he'd never even heard of the Kinks. In any case, if I had to describe Lawrence's appearance, it was like the ghost of Mod had taken shrooms and then mated with the spirit of the sort of old man who dresses up to play chess in the park. We all--for I was not yet enlightened on this point, either--thought his dress bizarre, but in truth he had that rare thing, real style. It was his artist's eye coming through.

But back to the booze already.

"You sure?" I said to Lawrence, shaking the Bacardi bottle a bit.

He shrugged apologetically, and directed his attention toward fiddling with the fraying jacket edge of his library copy of Great Expectations, so I considered my offer declined. An image of Ender casually taking shots drifted through my mind, and for a second I thought of drinking both bottles. But I only drank the one I'd opened for myself. I liked the taste, which was lucky, since this was probably not going to get me noticeably drunk. Not that there seemed any point in getting buzzed or drunk by myself. What Ender--or anyone else who wasn't an alcoholic--could get out of drinking on his own was unclear to me.

We went on peaceably talking until Lawrence's roommate came back, at which point I chose to excuse myself.

"I want to see you this weekend," I said at the door.

"Yes. Meet at breakfast?"

"Well, I'm tutoring in the morning--"

"At lunch then."

"Actually, I'm going to the water polo match that starts at noon."

"What?" said Lawrence, laughing. "Spud, wasn't it you who said there's nothing worse than watching a bar brawl set in a swimming pool?"

"I told Ender I'd go."

"So that you can wave him a sign of geometric formulae?"

Lawrence, whose father taught math at the University of Chicago, was allowed to say "formulae" without sounding like an asshole.

I said, "No, it's to support him." Don't go red, don't go red, but damn it of course I could feel myself turning a dainty stupid pink. God, I hated being pale. "We've gotten friendly. He needs to get his confidence back, between this school bullshit and everything. I mean, he asked me to come."

Lawrence seemed uninterested, so I guessed I was successfully playing it casual.

"Tomorrow afternoon, then."

"Definitely," I said, and left with a smile on my face. All right, so maybe I didn't have Lawrence back lock, stock, and barrel, the way it used to be. There was still some invisible barrier between us that our words couldn't climb, and I didn't know why.

But I felt I'd probably at least gotten back our friendship's basic barrel, and some stock to reload it with, and that was certainly better than losing the rifle--than losing Lawrence, that is--entirely. Which was what I'd spent the whole week worrying I'd done.

* * *

"You have a key to the natatorium?"

"Gee, Spaulding, say it louder," said Ender, but he was smiling. It was true that I'd made no effort to lower my voice, but there was no one else around. The water polo match did not start for over an hour, and while there were people doing setup, that was in the pool area, and we were all the way around back at the locker room. I really was surprised about the key, though. In terms of crimes that commanded harsh discipline, stealing keys to school buildings was right up there.

The lights sputtered on, and I followed Ender inside, shrugging off my coat. It was always warm in the natatorium.

"So how'd you get the key?" I said.

"It's a copy someone got pressed, years ago," he said, locking us in. "Been around the whole time I've been on swim team, anyway." He puffed up. "And now I'm the keyholder."

I nodded, and he said, "Stockwell, that means you act impressed."

"Sweet Christ!" I said, being bratty. "Keyholder? I'm not worthy to lick your sh_owww_, fuck!"

I'd meant to stagger back into a rank of lockers, but not to slam my skull against one of the metal latches.

"Ha!" cried Ender. "Karma, my man. Now you're sorry Krishna, sorry Krishna."

Krishna Krishna, sorry sorry. People as well-off as the Endicotts, I reflected, probably spent a lot of time in airports.

"Karma for sarcasm," I muttered. "Karmcasm."

"Karmgasm," said Ender, and cracked up.

I laughed too, then stumbled onto a bench and rubbed my head with both hands. Ender came up behind me, pushed my hands away, began to rub my skull for me. Well, he was more stroking my hair like I was his pet cat. But I wasn't thinking about the pain anymore.

"What's the capital of Iceland?" he said, which was not what I was expecting to hear from him. Now, or ever.

"Reykjavík."

"Good, guess you didn't gork this thing," he said, rapping my crown with his knuckles. "My future's kinda riding on it. Only I just realized, I don't know what the hell the capital of Iceland is. So I guess you could be making it up."

"It's Reykjavík."

"How do you even know that?"

I shrugged. I'd never sat down to study capitals but I knew loads of them, and did not know what it was like not to simply pick up such things.

"What's the capital of Brazil?" he said.

"Brasília."

He laughed and bent my head back by the chin to look down at me. I smiled.

"It is not," he said. "You are making this shit up!"

"I know, it sounds fake," I said. "And it is fake in that it's a planned city. Look it up in the '71 World Book at the library."

"You're a genius, man."

"No," I said. "That's only factual knowledge, not--"

"God, take a compliment, genius," said Ender, and gave my cheek a slap.

Then he smiled, led me to his locker, and stripped to his Speedo. The Speedo was red, not purple like he had to wear for the match, and it had also definitely gotten too small for him, but Ender said it was his lucky one. He proceeded to muck around with the fit of his goggles, staring into a mirror on the locker door, while I sat on the bench behind him, trying to rest my eyes anywhere but on his body and especially not on his beautiful barely covered pert ass--and suddenly I was very aware that I had no idea what the hell I was doing in here. All Ender had said at the end of geometry tutoring was, "I go in early to change before meets. You want to come?" So I'd followed him. Somehow I had not expected to spend this time watching him stare into a mirror.

Suddenly he glanced back at me. I quickly averted my eyes.

"Why do you keep looking away?" he said. "Look at me."

I raised my eyes and forced myself to look at him.

"You're so funny, Spaulding," he said. "Go ahead and look at me. Why else did I bring you in here?"

"Oh," was all I could manage to say, and even with this invitation, it was very hard to convince myself that it was O.K. to give Ender the elevator eyes treatment. First, because I had no blueprint for it. Staring at a guy running around on a field? Yeah, sure. That was what sports spectation was all about, even if you found that your motivation for looking wasn't strictly gameplay anymore. But to look down at someone's feet and then tilt lovingly up, when those feet weren't high heels clicking into some lucky guy's office for the first time? Man, did that seem weird. It went against my every instinct for social preservation. Guys didn't look at other guys, but if they did, they certainly didn't get caught. You didn't leisurely check out some other boy, not unless you want to land yourself in some serious shit. I knew that very well, and I'd never even been wanted to check out a guy until this past week. So some sliver of me was convinced that Ender just might turn around, grab me by the throat, slam me into the lockers, and threaten my stupid shrimpy faggot ass, you hear me, you fuckin' fag?

That's how engrained that shit was; that's how wrong it felt.

Ender needlessly stood on the balls of his feet to mess with something on the locker's top shelf, and that did it. Oh God, the smooth sinews and sharp lines. Warm skin without so much the rumor of a hair. Sculpted calves: my tongue had seen the other side. Flawless ass, the red fabric more like paint over firm globes: I supposed (and now my own cheeks went red) my tongue had seen the other side of that, too. And then, farther up, God, his broad, muscular shoulders. Ender's top half was mostly a mystery to me. Other than that abortive inhale, I'd practically not touched him above the waist.

Or rather, he hadn't had me touch him there. I was very aware that Ender was in charge here. He was the initiator, the captain, the idol. Satyr, icon.

At last he shut his locker and turned to me. Slowly.

The whole tenor of the room changed. The buzz of harsh fluorescent lighting, the splintering benches, the spare white walls, that was all still the same. It still smelled like chlorine and cleaning liquid. But somehow Ender was pushing all that away from my senses like a force field radiating power and glory and sex. The way he was looking at me--if you could bottle it, there'd be no better drug. His gaze, that was what kept doing me in, that in particular was what got me so high. The gaze and, up close, his smell.

"What do you think?" he said, and could have meant several different things. Face-to-face with me now, he leaned back against the lockers and languidly pushed his right arm up and over his head, where he let it rest. No hair underneath, just as I'd perhaps already thought about and secretly hoped for. I didn't know why; I'd previously considered the school swimmers' lack of body hair to be freakish. But somehow bare was exactly how Ender was meant to be. Well, he was bare except for in one place: that manly musky nest of his, which was still covered up, but which burned vividly in my mind's eye. The hair there was brown--significantly darker than the hair on his head. I hadn't known then that a lot of natural blonds have darker pubic hair, so that had surprised me. But I liked it.

His eyes were half shut and drifting down over his own chest and taut abdomen, then gliding back up to the ceiling, sometimes closing entirely. He looked lost in himself. And why shouldn't he be? He was like a warrior too invincible to have battle scars. A carved monument to masculinity. A young Greek god.

"What do you think of me, Spaulding?" he said low.

"I like you," I said, feeling a sick excitement.

"Be more specific," he said with his eyes closed.

Staring at the bulge--so big, even when soft--across from me, I said, "I like your body."

He opened his eyes and smiled when he saw where I'd been looking, and said, "I don't think you just like it."

"I--love it." I wanted to fuck off into the woods forever after I said that. But I didn't fuck off into the woods. I sat there on the bench and stared up at Ender.

"Show me how much," he said, and pulled me forward by my elbows. Forward, not up to my feet. Ah, shit...I was shaking my head no from my awkward position on the ground, staggered on one knee like I was proposing to someone. He had his hands on my shoulders trying to tell me not to get up like I was trying to do.

I said, "You can't be serious, not in here! Won't people be coming in soon?"

"Relax, man," Ender said, kneading my shoulders.

"No, come on. It's too exposed, and it's all grotty in here--"

He released my shoulders and pulled me to my feet. We were standing very close together; he was looking at me very intensely; he put one hand behind my head.

"I'm a fuckin' nervous wreck, Spaulding," he said. "I always am before big matches. And this one is huge. This decides whether we go on to quarterfinals. You know what would really help me out is if you..."

He didn't have to finish. I looked down in the hopes of not letting his gaze sucker me into anything.

"We've got at least twenty minutes before anyone else shows up, right hand to God." What his right hand was actually doing was rubbing circles around the base of my skull and the back of my neck, like I was a dog he knew just how to scratch.

"I thought they told athletes not to do this before games," I said with my eyes closed.

"Holding off only distracts me. I have to go into games spent; takes the edge off, makes me feel more confident. I really need confidence today, man," he was saying.

The charm in his voice almost had me swaying.

"Spaulding," he said low. I opened my eyes, and with him looking at me like he was, I almost couldn't remember who I was. Hyakinthos? Spaulding? Spaulding. "Spaulding..."

"Make me confident, Spaulding," he said, and I couldn't help it, I looked at him with what must have been doting acquiescence, because he moved his hand to my crown and slowly pushed me down and already I made a sound in my throat, an small inflected sigh of anticipation. When I got to my knees, I was still not entirely on board with things. But when I put my hands on the back of Ender's thighs and looked up into his eager eyes, I knew with a jolt that this was where I was supposed to be.

He moved to take off my glasses, but I brushed his hand away.

"I want to be able to see."

"Huh, that's right," he said, stroking my hair. "Stockwell's blind."

I nuzzled my face into his crotch for a while, reveling in the sensation of his cock getting harder and harder against my cheek as I rubbed against it, breathed warmly over it. I traced its outline with my nose, found myself licking it through the fabric. His thigh twitched.

"Make me confident--"

Ender's eyes were closed.

"You are confident, you were born to swim, you're..." I raked my fingers up and down the sides of his legs. "Magnificent."

He opened his eyes halfway, smile darting at the corner of his lips, glowing above me like Dionysos.

"Show me," he said, taking my hands and putting them at the waistband of his Speedo. My heart hammered, and I took a moment to rest my forehead against one of Ender's thighs and gather myself. I looked up straight into his eyes and they said, Show me you know who I am.

Then I was peeling down the waistband with my lips pressed to the skin just above, as his cock strained for release; it sprang up against me as I rolled the Speedo down until it fell to Ender's ankles. I took his cock in hand and grazed the slightly wet tip along my jawline while he stepped neatly out of his suit.

Pushing my head away, Ender said, "Look at me," and he didn't mean in his eyes. I leaned back and stared up at him, at every inch of his body. His thick legs, cut torso. Sharp hipbones--the left one was studded with a big, lovely black mole. Sturdy biceps, strong chin. Golden boy with a golden head of hair. You know, for a moment I'd felt a twinge of doubt, a sudden surreal awareness that I was kneeling with my mouth dangerously close to someone's hard dick and how could that be, that wasn't me was it, who'd be doing such a thing? But that thought vanished when I looked at him again fully nude, and witnessed him--the masculine essence incarnate. And I, careening forward, my hands running up his inner thighs, I was going to bathe him in adoration, I was going to genuflect to the icon. I was going to show him just what I thought of those perfect, throbbing seven-plus inches.

I was going to fucking worship his cock.

(Until that moment I'd never imagined myself capable of having such a thought.)

I licked straight up the underside. Then again up the left side and the right. Ender groaned and pushed impatiently at my head. So I drew the glans into my mouth. Gently stroking the shaft. He pushed on me again, so I started down on him, begging my gag reflex to behave itself. It didn't, although I thought I got maybe a little further that time before it kicked in. Ender didn't have to hold me in place; I was exerting all my willpower to hold, relax, go further, stop, hold. He squirmed against me.

"Ahhh--"

I was about at my limit, and I wrapped one hand around the base. I put my other hand at the back of his thigh, pulling myself even closer against him. Ender sighed. I sighed. He moaned when he felt me sigh around him, and I sucked him harder in response.

He thrust into my mouth and I pulled back, nearly pulled off entirely. No. I really did not want to go that way again. I looked up into his eyes. He gave the slightest smiling nod that somehow said, Trust me. So I did, and eased back on.

"Yes--show me, give me--"

He did not push me again and we relaxed into each other, trading moans. He eventually took the hand I had curled against his thigh and guided it cockward, then lower...ah. I cupped his balls. Somehow that had not remotely occurred to me--perhaps because my own were so sensitive that I hardly even trusted myself to handle them. I supposed I had a lot to learn. I swept my thumb across them and Ender groaned. I pulled my mouth off for a minute to look below. He had a beautiful sack that I'd been too lost in penile tunnel vision to really notice before. Perfectly proportional to his organ, smooth, tight, lightly furred. I gently caressed the sack while kissing the base of his cock and the blond god dug all ten fingers into my dark hair.

"Yes, yes."

I went back to giving him head but kept up the gentle massaging, and he panted hard, hard, harder. My jaw was starting to protest at this workout. I ignored it.

"Shit, yes, Spaulding!" He was touching my forehead, my ears, my hair, and I felt a druglike rush hurtle through my veins, a surge of joy and pride and wanting him to want me. I could have sped up but instead I slowed down, and then came to a halt and just held him in my mouth and suckled gently. Then harder. His hand at the back of my neck seemed to tremble.

"Spaulding, Spaulding--you're gonna be the fuckin' death of me."

Somehow this was the most touching thing I'd ever heard. He stroked my jaw until I looked up at him and he gave me a stern smile. It said, Keep going. And also, Are you sure you want what's coming? I looked back at him and tried to think through my eyeballs, Yes, I think so. He groaned deeply as I went on with full speed and vigor, and I was groaning back, and my head was swimming, and the echoes of voices out by the pool were as far away as the planet Mars, and I gently squeezed his balls and he grunted like an animal, and you could practically smell raw lust dripping from our pores, and....

He pulled me roughly off him by the hair and for a second I was pissed and scowled, but then I could see from his expression and the telltale feel of the organs in my hands that he wasn't being rough with me but trying to do me a favor. But I shook my head and put my lips against his cockhead and looked up at him. I'd never felt more submissive in my life but somehow it didn't bother me. I didn't want to be afraid of his cum. I wanted to take it willingly and see how I liked it.

So he smiled and let me take him back into my mouth.

He came soon after, hot and hard and long. I let the head pulse against my tongue while I went on palming the shaft, and thought, There are worse tastes in the world, and worse sensations.

I actually liked it more than that--although I won't lie, his cum tasted pretty funky to me, and I preferred my own (don't pretend you've never tried yours)--but there was a limit to how faggy I felt safe getting, even in my own head.

I also won't pretend I wasn't inept at coordinating stroke, suck, and swallow all at once; I ended up letting cum dribble all over my chin like I was some drooling lobotomy patient. I tried to wipe it with the back of my hand while I trailed a gentle tongue over Ender's spent cock, cleaning it, venerating it.

At last he pushed me off him, looking down at me with the warmth of a sun god. He brought me to my feet and I felt like I'd been confirmed in the faith, in the church of Ender. From first communion to confirmation in less than a week: well, Ender was certainly more efficient than the Episcopal Church had ever been.

We were smiling like a couple of idiots. Ender licked his thumb and rubbed my chin to get it cleaner, and said, "You're a quick study, Stockwell. Not like me, huh?"

"It's all about motivation," I said.

"Definitely doesn't sound like me with school."

"No, I'd call you motivated too, you know," I said. "You made good progress this morning."

"Well keep doing that and you bet I'll be motivated." He peered over to see the clock. "God damn it. We have to get dressed."

Although of course he only had a Speedo to put on--he asked me to fetch his purple school one--and I hadn't undressed at all. I did take the opportunity to mop at my chin a little more with my handkerchief, though.

Ender snapped the waistband of his uniform Speedo, then smiled and said, "Spaulding, you oughta put your coat on."

"I'm not cold."

His smile turned naughty and he said, "Unless you want to pretend you can't keep toothpaste in your mouth."

He ran a finger down my dark cotton shirt, and I looked down and saw the very obvious streak of drying cum and spit. I tried to scrub at it, but Ender shook his head and said, "That's not gonna work. There's a sink but guys are about to start coming in." I figured I should trust him on this. So I put on my trusty black duffel coat and allowed Ender to usher me back out the way we'd entered. Ender was right about the timing; I could hear the approaching voices of what sounded like the Mount Hermon team heading to the natatorium. I slipped round to the front of the building before the equipment keeper showed up with the coach's key to let the other swimmers into the locker room.

Later I sat in the stands rereading Demian as people started filtering in, and I nodded at the first members of the junior class to show. Eventually Tilden McHenry came in with some of the underclassman chess clubbers and sat next to me, which I didn't mind. Tilden took himself the least seriously out of that crew. I had a fair amount in common with them, but they, like I said, were too self-serious, and too straight--in the social sense, not in the sexual one--for me to want to hang around them for too long at a time.

In Tilden's favor specifically was that I was pretty sure he hadn't bitched about Ender the other day at lunch. I guess I felt stupid getting hung up on crap like that when nothing changed the fact that at Napier, Ender was considered The Man. But what can I say? Swallow someone's cum and you tend to get oversensitive where they're concerned.

"Aren't you warm, Spaulding?" said Tilden at some point. I did look stupid wearing a coat in there. The natatorium at Napier had shitty heating, and it was always hot in the winter.

"Nah, I'm fine," I said. "I'm great."

And I was, even if I was sweating some. I was also easy to spot in a mass of people sporting polo shirts, or else rolled-up sleeves. So when Ender came out to the poolside he picked me out at once, and we smiled at each other. Then he pulled on his blue home cap and transformed into the slick-headed, aqua-matic Ender that he became in the pool--that strange being that stroked itself over the water with such pure mechanical efficiency.

I put my book away for good and sat there watching with my chin on my hand as starting positions were assumed. And then the whistle blew, and the water violence began.

Water polo had always struck me as some sort of combination of wrestling, basketball, and hockey that was played in the water. Except it involved an enormous amount of fouls--perhaps, the way it was played in our league, even more than hockey. It was consequently accompanied by a near-constant barrage of whistle blasts from the ref. I did not enjoy watching water polo, and hadn't been to a Napier match in years. But between the physical gameplay and the Speedo uniforms, water polo could amount to a pretty hilariously homoerotic display. If I had been able to keep track of Ender, I might have found it almost titillating.

But Ender was a masterful driver, and he was all over the pool. Between all the splashing and the identical swim caps and Ender's ranging, I could barely catch where he was half the time. He was so sneaky that he didn't need to play as dirty as the other guys did. The only thing he did above the surface that could be called dirty--and I'd heard this before, but I so rarely attended water polo games that I'd never seen it for myself--was that he would get in guys' faces and pretend he was going in for a kiss. He did it a couple times during the match, and it indeed proved an effective move. He did it to the same guy both times, but the element of surprise had little to do with the kiss's success, for the move so discomfited the Mount Hermon player that even though you could see the guy was fighting not to let it get to him, he jerked away the second time, too. It totally screwed up his play both times.

The Napier student body loved this. They loved that the water polo captain was more dedicated to the game than to his personal dignity.

Supposedly Ender also murmured sexual comments to his opponents to throw them, although of course I couldn't hear that. This, too, the Napier guys thought was a laugh riot, and wholly admirable.

I couldn't help but wonder if he just said precomposed things to random players, or if some of his "trash talk" was entirely in earnest.

But in any case, the Newts won that morning, and we won solidly. Ender killed it. Mount Hermon looked like they wanted to burst into tears by the end. The victory cheers went up, and as Ender got out of the pool he was showered in affection and got both his arms lifted in the air. It wasn't only the water polo guys swarming him, but what looked to be the whole rest of the swim team, who'd shown up out of solidarity. And while I was unsurprised by the physical affection from the water polo guys, as theirs was a touchy sport by nature, it was weird to watch the swim team members kiss Ender's biceps--and did that Stephens guy just go for his cheek? God, swim team culture was weird. Swimming was theoretically a sort of solitary sport like track, but compare this touchy-feely display to the more reserved mien of the track team and it was like the difference between Brazilians and Icelanders.

(Ah...Brasília, Reykjavík, make me confident, ahhh, Spaulding, yes.)

I watched Ender get fêted and hoped I'd had even a little to do with his resounding success today. Or at least something to do with the smile to beat the band that he had on his face. The spectators were starting to get up, so I followed suit and figured I'd go down and congratulate Ender, and then let him go be the swim hero while I went to lunch. But as I got closer, he caught my eye and gave me the slightest jerk of the head to the right--asking me, it seemed, to go that direction instead of filing toward the main exit with everyone else. I still came up to him and shook his hand, though.

"You were incredible down there, Ender. I mean it."

"Hey, thanks, Stockwell!" Then he leaned forward to mumble, "Exit at the end." I was pretty sure he was talking about some side door next to the last bleacher, on the right like he'd signaled. So I drifted right, fighting the current of the crowd, pretending like I was looking for someone. I heard Ender say, "All right, fellas, I should go find my parents."

I found the door and tried it, but it was locked. So I leaned against it, and as it was directly across from the entrance to the locker room, I watched with an anthropologist's curious gaze as members of both schools' teams skittered in one by one and two by two. A Napieran put his arm around one of the Mount Hermon guys--a redhead who'd valiantly tried not to let Mount Hermon get crushed--and seemed to be saying something sportsmanlike as they went inside. File under more team-sport behaviors you'd never see from the track guys.

A couple Napierans also went dodging around the locker room entrance, snapping each other with towels. O.K., that was standard behavior, although the track team, which generally didn't use the gym showers, went in more for pantsing people to harass them. You quickly learned to get shorts with drawstrings and stretch them until you could tie them around your neck. Although now that I was a veteran member of the team, I got left alone if I chose to be--and I did choose to be.

Ender materialized next to me from under the bleachers.

"Hey."

"I thought you were looking for your parents," I said.

"Oh, they're not here, I was just saying that," said Ender, bright-eyed and looking exceptionally energetic. "Now stop talking and get under here with me."

I looked toward the pool and he tugged me stumbling to join him under the stands.

"Some advice, Stockwell," he said. "Never look around before you do something suspicious."

"I always look both ways before I cross," I said. "I just do."

"Doesn't do any good. If you look and someone's looking, they know you're looking around, so it won't look right anyway. Don't look, just do it." He shook his head like a dog--he was still dripping wet--and a flick of water landed on one of my lenses. "You won't land in any shit you weren't going to land in anyway." And he slicked his hair back and smiled.

This in fact seemed surprisingly shrewd advice.

Ender glanced overhead, listening to the last footsteps of people clanking away down toward the other end of the bleachers. Then without warning he grabbed me around the waist and pulled us close together, bare skin against thick wool, his forehead touching mine.

"What the--what are you d--!"

He clamped a hand over my mouth.

"Wow, Spaulding, you really are shitty at this." He must have thought it was safe to lift his hand, but as soon as he did, I said, "In public?! What are--" He silenced me again but didn't say anything this time, just waited for me to get used to the idea that we were embracing where anyone might see if they tried to use that side door. I'd been trying to lean back and push him away, but my power was in my legs, not my arms; I nearly deprived myself of the Presidential Fitness Award thanks to the pull-up section. Ender now had both hands clasped around my waist again and my struggle petered out. I couldn't deny that part of me liked being touched, even if the other part was about to vomit with anxiety. I tried to block out the sound of people chatting as they started to clean up, right on the other side of the stands.

"We're barely in public," Ender said into my ear. "I can't help it, that match got me so fucking charged up--I am off the walls excited, man--" From his breathlessness, I could believe it. "Couldn't stay away from you--I'm burning up, I feel like I could do a triathlon--" He shifted to hold me more from the side, pressing up against the outside of my thigh. "Do you feel that?"

Of course I did. He was rock hard.

"What the hell are you doing, Ender," I said, and he let me finish the question this time.

"I need you," he said, and slowly licked my neck.

"Jesus, you're insatiable."

He stuck his tongue in my ear and said nothing--then started fucking his tongue in and out of my ear. My face burned, and I was trying not to do anything to encourage him, but shit, for some reason that was turning me on, and how. But I wasn't about to do a damn thing with him under the natatorium bleachers, that was for sure, and I couldn't say I was interested in putting my mouth anywhere on him until he took a shower. Chlorine tasted unbearably nasty to me.

I suddenly made an embarrassing moany noise without meaning to, and Ender slapped a hand over my mouth and listened, but the clean-up people were still going about their business. When he removed his hand we both cracked up a little, as silently as possible, but of course the more we tried to be quiet the harder it was not to laugh. For the first time I appreciated that being in public might be a little exciting instead of flat-out terrifying. Not that I was going to let this go any further.

Ender had stepped back and bent over trying to stop laughing, and now he looked at me no less lustfully, but in a calmer voice at least, and said, "O.K., let's go."

"How do you mean?"

There was some random equipment stowed under the bleachers, and Ender tossed me a kickboard that was lying around.

"Pretend you're helping me carry something into the locker room," he said. "You can leave through there, they probably already shut the main exits." He took his towel off his shoulders, tied it around his waist, and then walked straight out from under the stands and past the end of the pool without, indeed, looking around at all. I tried to follow his example as I trailed him, kickboard under my arm, looking, I was sure, not at all like someone who was supposed to be walking into the locker room--not in my duffel coat with a school bag over my shoulder. But whatever.

Inside, I figured Ender would turn toward the steam of the showers and I would walk on through the main room, but he paused and put his hand on my back and steered me toward a storage area behind an aluminum wire gate. It was in full view of anyone walking through the main passageway, and I thought we were just putting the kickboard away, so I obeyed him without question. But once we were inside he shut the gate and guided me further inside, behind a bunch of stacked bins, and then kissed the back of my neck.

"What the hell, man!"

"Shhh."

He turned me around to face him and I gave him a Look.

"No one can see us back here," he said, and took off his towel, put it around my neck, and tugged playfully on the ends. He was right, but that was beside the point.

"What if someone comes in? And what're we even talking about here? Because sorry, but you're covered in chlorine and it's gross."

"It'll go away fast," said Ender. "It'll all be fast. Please, Spaulding, I could climb the walls, I am so out of my mind horny."

"So jack it in the showers, they're right around that wall."

Ender was caressing my neck and cheeks. I tried to ignore it.

"Are you pissed at me?" he said.

"No, but I'm getting there."

He took his hands off me.

"Spaulding," Ender said, looking suddenly and honestly dejected, "how was I out there, just now?"

"What?"

"Did I do O.K.?" he said quietly. "I'm asking you because I don't want you to lie to me. I know people do that sometimes."

"What?" I said. "Are you asking about how you did in the game? Ender, you scored the most goals of anyone! You were a star--you were wonderful."

"I guess."

"What's the problem? You can't really think you didn't do well."

He shrugged.

"I dunno. I dunno sometimes, man."

"Ender. You were incredible."

The funny look on his face started to fade, but he still said very seriously, "You swear?"

This time I was the one to embrace him. I wasn't even thinking about it, I just treated him like I would Lawrence. And for a moment, it all felt very nice and friendly.

But then Ender's hands alit on my back and started rubbing up and down and I remembered that hugging him was probably a boneheaded move.

"I'll be quick," he said, in a tone of voice very unlike the dejected one he'd been using a minute ago. He was grinding against my leg. That was very hard to ignore, but ignore it I did.

"No, not right now."

"So quick, please."

"I--" Some part of me was thinking, Do you really want to spend the rest of your natural life in a storage area, arguing with Ender over this? "I...don't know."

My answer had already evolved and Ender could probably hear in my voice, too, that I was giving in. He took my hand and put it on his hard bulge. Then pushed down on my shoulders, not as a suggestion but as something I'd have to aggressively resist if I wanted to resist. Oh, whatever. I didn't try to resist. He'd promised it would be fast. And I did feel pretty sorry for him that he could crush a water polo match and come away from it feeling like he didn't know if he'd done well. What was going on there, you know?

I'd also suddenly gotten the sense that all of today was some kind of big test, and if it was, I damn sure wanted to pass it.

So I sensibly put Ender's towel under my knees, then I pulled down the Speedo and sampled his cock with my mouth. And indeed, I cringed when I tasted the chlorine. Ender put his hand behind my head and pushed and so I tried to get over it and go deeper. But I apparently wasn't going fast enough for him, because he gripped the back of my skull before I could stop him, and thrust himself at least another inch into my mouth. I gagged terribly, and the chlorine tasted like absolute shit, and for a moment I thought Ender was backing off and I was relieved, but I'd barely taken a solid breath when he thrust back in, even deeper.

"Nmmnnnn!" was about all I could manage to say, and as I said it Ender moaned and I realized I couldn't even protest this treatment without heightening his pleasure. But he was really testing my gag reflex and a veritable tidal wave of saliva came surging out of my mouth, ugh ugh ugh, oh God I was miserable--I started to gag very loudly--

I guess this display of distress was impressive enough to get him to back off, because he released my head.

I gasped for breath. My lenses were all fucked up, both from the drips of water they'd acquired at the pool and now from the tears leaking out of my eyes, too.

"I nearly," I said. "Threw up."

Ender petted my hair from high up.

"But you didn't," he said.

"No, fuck, Ender, I want to stop," I said. "This is disgusting, c'mon. Don't fucking do that to me, man."

"O.K., O.K., so that spot is too far, now I know not to go past it. You're doing so good, Spaulding, come on, please."

Jesus Christ, I admit it, I felt sorry for him. He was looking at me like he was an abandoned dog. I wanted to be mad at him. I was not cool with what he was doing. And yet he was stroking my hair, and now for some reason I felt guilty, and fuck, did he turn me on, and--

"I'm sorry," he offered.

I looked up at him fondly, but there was a warning in my expression, too. I saw the Ender that I wanted to see looking down at me, and I sighed in the good way and put my mouth back over his cockhead.

I knew going in what he was probably going to do next. But some part of me was maybe still hoping for a sucking-off like this morning's, and not a fucking-into the way our first time had ended up. No such luck; Ender grabbed my head, fed me his cock, and started fucking my mouth. To his credit, he was masterful in remembering where my do-not-cross line was, and he thrust right up to it but never beyond, at least not until I started relaxing enough that the line advanced a little further, and then again a little further. I hated the moments when he hit the limit and I gagged, but I was coming to see that this was O.K. Better than O.K.: it was fun, it was pretty damn hot. I preferred the other way of doing business, fellatio-wise, but there was something raw and thrilling about turning my body over to Ender. It excited me to trust him and to let him rut into my mouth like a ram in tupping season.

"Mmnnmm," was the sound coming from my mouth now. "Mmm..."

"Hah, hah, hahh," was the sound starting to come faster from him, although he'd been, we'd both been, trying to stay quiet. I looked up. He had one hand grasping the back of my head, and with the other he was brushing back his own hair, his eyes closing and then drifting back open, closing and opening. He looked down at me and was muttering, "Yes, hell yes...shit, Spaulding, I love...the way you look...with my cock in your face."

Like a possessed man I popped my head off Ender's dick before he could stop me and said more loudly than was advisable, "Oh, I'm such a whore for your big fucking cock."

Oh God, why had I said something like that? Spaulding, you freakish dumbass--!

To this day I don't know where it came from. I mean, I got my rocks off with my imagination or sometimes with the static pictures in dirty magazines; I hadn't seen any pornography (it wasn't exactly in common supply), and Fritz the Cat was the dirtiest moving picture that had ever permeated my eyeballs and eardrums. I'd already plunged back onto the aforementioned big fucking cock to hide my surge of deep embarrassment, but Ender laughed lightly, like what I'd said was unremarkable, and then grabbed me by the hair--not hard, just to get my attention for a moment.

"Nah, trust me, Spaulding, I'm the whore," he said in his dirty voice, grinning, then--I kept my eyes on him as I moved back down onto his cock--licked his free fingers, pushed them down to his abdominals, and rubbed himself there slowly. Then he sucked at his teeth and clamped his eyes shut for a moment. "I am such a whore."

I had no idea what to make of this display, but the intrigue was pretty sexy in of itself.

Then I popped off again; he let me.

"So what am I?" I said. I dove back down and he thrust into me harder than ever.

"One cool cat, Spaulding," he mumbled, his eyes closing, his head tilting back. "Ah, you are one, hah--cooool cat hahh fuck--"

Then he just had to seize my head with both hands and go after me mercilessly. It ruined the climax and cast a pall over this whole episode that I'd started out not wanting, that we had built into something enjoyable, and that now once again saw me uselessly trying to pull out of Ender's grip as he fucked my mouth like a battering ram. Slobbering, sputtering, digging my nails into his thighs, but quickly realizing going limp was the better option. So I tried to become deadweight. Let Ender hold me up by the head if he wanted to block my vital airways so goddamn badly.

He eased up just as I could tell he was about to come, suddenly very slow and calm, tenderly touching the side of my face with one hand and stroking my hair with the other. This almost made me even more pissed off, but it was like my mouth had a mind of its own, and it glided forward, then backward again, to help him, and that was all it took to set him off.

"Yes, yes, shhhhit yes--"

The chlorine taste and smell was still hanging around in my mouth and nose, and let me tell you, it didn't complement the taste of his cum. But I kept more of the cum in my mouth this time--there was less of it, at least. And I still swallowed it. Whatever.

I let his cock fall from my mouth with no further attention. Ender exhaled, toyed with himself a little, still pretty hard, and then pulled his Speedo up. Hesitated.

"You O.K., man?" he said.

I just capital-L Looked at him.

"Shit," he said. "Yeah. I know you didn't want it like that, told myself I wouldn't, but--"

"Ender," I said, rubbing at my messy face, looking down. "Do not do that to me."

"I'm sorry. That was crappy of me, Spaulding," he said. "I get all--carried away."

He got on his haunches in front of me and put his hand on my shoulder, which I told myself I wouldn't let him do, but which I let him do. I looked at him. It seemed to me that he meant it, being sorry. He struck me as a dog that didn't so much willfully err as follow his natural instinct. He simply needed better training. This was perhaps a condescending way to put it, but that's what came to mind. Anyway, true condescension came from a place of superiority, and I mean, I was kneeling down in front of the golden boy whom I only wanted to please. If anyone was the dog it was me.

"Are you mad?"

"Nah," I said, and it was true; I found that I felt more tired than angry.

He smiled, and even if he hadn't apologized, there was a good chance that that lovely sight alone would have swayed me to forgive and forget. Because I was a whore for that big smile of his, too.

He rubbed his thumb at the corner of my mouth and I couldn't help but smile a little in return.

"That's it," he said, smiling wider. My own smile got bigger and I tried to turn my head away and stop grinning like such an idiot, but Ender kept hold of me and laughed, and I laughed back, and we looked at each other and both laughed harder. My head was a-spin. I felt so--cool. To think that we were standing here together, Ender and I, sharing such a private happy moment. I sighed with the joy of it.

Finally we calmed down, and he helped me to my feet. We carefully picked our way out of the storage area and emerged into a locker room that sounded near-empty. The water polo guys had probably wanted to hurry up and try to get to lunch before the dining hall closed.

"Here, there's a sink," said Ender, steering me into the main room.

I glanced in the direction of the voices coming from over the locker ranks, and Ender wandered over to take a look, then came back shrugging.

"Only some Mount Hermon guys," he said. "Doesn't matter."

I started washing my face of its tearstreaks and what have you; he went to his locker. Not long after, I felt someone tugging at my glasses, which were pushed up over my head, and I instinctively slammed my hand onto the offending wrist and held fast.

"Hot damn!" said Ender, laughing. "You're like a Venus fuckin' flytrap, Spaulding." I let go and squinted over at him. He'd put on sweatpants and a pullover, and had my glasses in hand.

"You surprised me," I said.

He leaned back against the long sink, looked through my lenses.

"Wow are these dirty."

I patted one of my coat pockets, and said, "There's a cloth in here." So he stood there trying to rub my lenses clean.

"Aren't you going to take a shower?" I said.

"Later," he said, hooking my glasses over his collar and stuffing the cloth back into my pocket. Then he stuck his head under a faucet--and, peeking over at my curiosity, said, "Otherwise my hair starts turning green."

Then he wiped his face and started lovingly combing his hair in the mirror. As I finished up at the sink I glanced at the blurry form beside me. I'd gotten over the roughing up from earlier, but an annoyance that hadn't previously come into full fledge now spread its wings. Twice today I'd gotten incredibly aroused, and twice today I'd gotten someone else off. But not once had I myself come close to getting off.

The whole situation would have seemed absurd to the Spaulding of one week ago. The old Spaulding wouldn't have dreamed of putting his mouth on another guy, but if he did suck a cock, he certainly would only have done it under circumstances of fair exchange. The good ol' you did mine, so I guess I have to do yours. Or whatever. Old Spaulding wouldn't have been able to fathom a scenario in which he wasn't getting anything back. Because what was the point otherwise? There was no point. It wasn't fair.

Well, there was a point, because new Spaulding did find it enjoyable to give Ender head. But at the same time, finding it enjoyable largely meant that I found it sexually exciting. And getting sexually excited was not something you really did for its own sake. Excitement was pleasurable because you knew that you were probably going to get off soon. But I wasn't getting off. Well, I had the first time, by my own volition, and I supposed I'd figured that there'd been not a hint of reciprocation because I'd shot off before he even got a chance to touch me. And then this morning, it was true that we hadn't had much time...but just now? I felt like I'd given something for nothing, for no good reason. And no, that wasn't fair, and if I allowed it to stand I was more yellow-bellied than I'd ever realized.

But how was I to bring it up? I didn't care to talk about any element of this situation out loud, let alone say something that really required me to stick my neck out. I was in awe of Ender and also in stupidly desperate want of his approval, and I didn't want to do anything that might annoy him or motivate him to call this all off. I suspected that Ender thought I knew the score, and that the score was something like, "You, Stockwell, suck my cock because you think I'm just that great, and then I clean your glasses for you and offer you free intoxicants to say thanks--thanks for being a good sport who knows his place."

I reflected again that I really had no idea what Ender's deal was. Didn't know to what extent he understood or accepted his sexual attractions. And if he didn't understand or accept them at all, I didn't know how much he would be inclined to wig out if I suggested that he ought to do something so demeaning as reciprocate.

As I toweled my face, Ender turned to me, put a hand on my back, took the towel, finished up patting me dry. Slid my glasses back on for me.

"Thanks," I muttered. My ruminating had not left me in the best mood, and I was about ready to get the hell out of the natatorium with its chemical smells and stark lights and disappointments. Hefting my schoolbag over my shoulder and fixing my glasses (no one can ever correctly seat someone else's glasses for them), I started walking down the nearest locker row to the exit. It was all quiet; it seemed everyone else had cleared out at last.

"Where are you going?" said Ender.

I turned and he was not following me apace or getting his things, but ambling down toward me with a funny smile on his face.

"Out?" I said.

"No way," said Ender. "Really?"

I must have looked baffled.

"You're just leaving," he said, leaning against a locker. "You don't want yours?"

"Excuse me?"

He cracked up. "Ahh, Stockwell, you creamed your pants, didn't you!"

"What? No!"

"So get the hell over here," he said, as if we'd drawn up a contract that I was supposed to have known about. He beckoned me with a sly Mephistophelean ease, and I approached him without conscious choice; he had bidden me, so I came. I walked up and stood close to him, but he grabbed my arms and pulled me closer, practically nose to nose. He shoved the strap of my schoolbag off my shoulder, and I turned to set the bag down.

As soon as I did, Ender seized me from behind so suddenly that I gave a shout.

"Shh," said Ender, but it trailed off into a laugh. His arms were wrapped around my ribcage like a very pleasant vise. "We're alone, but not that alone."

He kissed the back of my neck, then put his lips in my hair, and for a moment I slipped into a sweet contentment--but then I froze up and said, "Wait, is there anyone who might come in?"

"Probably not," said Ender.

"Probably?" I said, making a feeble attempt to pull forward out of his arms.

Ender stepped forward right along with me and said, "Don't you ever relax, man?" into my neck, and then kissed it again. "Sometimes Coach L or the equipment guys come in, but usually not. The chance, though..." (He squeezed my diaphragm hard and I huffed, but somehow it felt good.) "That's what makes it so much fun."

A small voice in my head said, Fun chances, huh? How this guy nearly got himself expelled becomes ever clearer.

But then I quashed that spoilsport thought.

Ender's chin was on my shoulder now and he'd started to rub my crotch with a warm, firm hand. I could feel him looking at me, and I couldn't help but get self-conscious and turn my face away from his gaze. I got very hard very fast. My poor cock wanted to know why it'd taken me so long to attend to him; my happy cock could hardly believe it was Ender's hands caressing him through the fabric. Argh, it hurt to be trapped in my jeans. But before much longer Ender took fast expert fingers to my belt and fly, and had me unzipped almost before I knew what was happening. He removed his right hand and then presented it to me all slick and said, "Spit on it," which is what he must have just done, too. I spat and then in a flash he was stroking my cock, which had already been slickening with precum. The spit was quite unnecessary.

"Jesus, are you wet," Ender said, but I barely heard him, because as soon as he touched me I made this embarrassing "ooOOHh" sound.

I breathed deeply, trying to calm the hell down before I came instantly in his hand. Oh God, Nat was right. It really was so much better when somebody else did this to you. And with Ender standing behind and over me, sort of hunching us over; and with my every breath and his every stroke amplified, because it was so quiet in here; and with his mouth on the side of my neck, kissing it, tongue-flicking it--I could hardly stand it, I could hardly contain myself. Ender was jerking hard and fast but somehow it just kept getting harder and faster, and as it intensified we leaned further and further forward, until I was resting my forehead against the lockers across the aisle, hunchbacked and panting.

"I'm--" I said, but didn't even get to finish the thought as I moaned and with Ender kissing the back of my ear I came hard, hard, hard...hard...still coming......ah.

"Ohhh, my God," I breathed, when it was over.

Ender laughed low and squeezed out some final drops. His other hand was covered in cum and I looked down at it and thought, There's the living proof that someone likes you enough to bring you to orgasm, and that set a thrill running through me. Damn. I was dizzy with elation.

"Liked that, huh?" Ender said.

"Yes," I groaned. We were still kind of bent over, and I was still pressed into the rank of lockers. I raised my arm to rest my forehead against it, instead of on the metal, which was becoming colder and harder as my sensory awareness came trickling back in. The whole thing had been pretty pathetically short, but I didn't even care. I was just happy I hadn't come at first touch.

Ender straightened me up and said, "Here." He was holding up his cum-coated hand. I knew what he wanted, and started licking my cum off him. I was nearly finished when he pulled the hand away and licked the last bits himself. I peered back at him in surprise. He took his fingers out of his mouth and raised his eyebrows and said only, "You grow good seed, Stockwell."

He turned me all the way around to face him and looked at me with this sort of knowing smirk, as if to say, I knew I would make your virgin dick come buckets, while he reached down and repackaged me. At last he slid my belt tongue through its loop, and then retrieved my schoolbag and held it out to me.

"Thanks," I said.

"See you soon."

"You're not coming to lunch?"

"The guys are gonna smuggle me some food. I don't like trying to rush down there after games."

"O.K.," I said. "Then, uh, yeah, see you."

I had this urge to hug him, but didn't have the balls to try something so overtly affectionate, at least not after a sex act. It seemed way too queer. I didn't really give a shit about it seeming queer at this point. But Ender sure might give a shit. So what if he'd put my cum in his mouth? Somehow that'd seemed a weirdly virile thing for him to do. Whereas hugging was, you know, mushy.

So we just looked at each other, and then Ender pulled my coat hood over my head and said, "Stay dry out there, Stockwell," in this bizarrely lascivious voice, and we both burst out laughing. When I ventured out into the gray and damp November afternoon, probably the last we'd get before all precipitation became snow, I was still laughing. I was also shaking my head--stunned that the past two glorious hours of my life could ever have happened in this real, rainy world of ours.

"Hey, ho, the wind and the rain," I recited to myself, and adopted a clownish grin. "For the rain it raineth every day!"

And then I broke into a mad sprint, charging for the dining hall, and--ah, sweet victory--slid in right before they locked the doors to incoming students.