#scenebreak
The streets were deserted all the way home. Big shock.
Why hadn’t I called a fifteen minute break and worked through the sequence with Tango?
Damn it. I walked faster.
How the hell had I said Juicy’s secret out loud without even knowing it?
Faster.
And why the hell hadn’t I just told Farmer-C to shut up instead of alienating every single friend I’d made since moving to Dumass?
I ran flat out.
If it hurt at all, I didn’t feel it.
I didn’t feel anything.
A short fence ran along the sidewalk. I jumped up onto it and fast-stepped along the cross beam. At the end, I jumped for the flagpole in someone’s yard. Would’ve been a stellar descent if my entire body wasn’t in need of traction. My side spasmed and my hands released the pole, flinging me onto the grass. Could’ve been worse. Could’ve been a driveway.
I rolled to my feet and sprinted. I still didn’t feel the pain.
At Auntie Mac’s house, Mike’s car filled the driveway.
Stellar.
I couldn’t even talk to Dad.
I ran around the side of the house, crashed through the gate and across the grass. I pounded over the diving board shouting bloody murder at the night sky and felt two seconds of absolute weightlessness before the cool water hit my shoes and sucked me down. Within moments, my lungs bitched me out.
Crap. It’s hard to hold your breath with bruised ribs.
My feet found the bottom of the pool and pushed up at an angle so when I broke the surface gasping and cursing, I was already in the shallow end.
“Eight-point-five,” someone behind me said.
I spun. Ow.
It was Mike. “Sorry to startle you, but I figured I should let you know I was here.” He was stretched in a lounge chair, holding a glass of something.
I looked around, breathing hard. “Is my dad out here?”
Mike gestured with his glass toward the house. “He’s on the phone. I came out here to give him a little privacy.” He pushed up from the chair. “I can go out front.”
“No. Sit.” I slogged my way out of the pool holding my chest with one arm. “I should go in and change, anyway.” Would my lungs ever slow the heck down? Ow.
“Here.” He tossed me a towel from the nearby table. “Your dad and I were going to swim. Mac’ll have a fit if you walk through her house soaking wet.”
“Thanks.” I toweled off my head and started toward the house, but the awkwardness of the whole thing stopped me. “Mike?”
“Yeah?”
I took a deep breath. “Any chance you don’t need to tell my dad about. . .” What? About my temper tantrum across the yard and into the pool fully dressed? How do you say that? How do you not say something about it?
He raised the glass to me. “Our secret, Ethan.” He smiled. “Does that get me a point or two in the okay-to-date-my-dad column?”
His directness was cool.
“Maybe one.”
He nodded.
“So. . . you’re ‘dating’?”
He laughed. “That’s a question I’ll let your dad field.”
“Fair enough.”
“Ethan?” He sat forward casually. “If I’m out of line, I get it, but you look like you could stand to talk about something, and I have a few minutes to kill.” He waved at the house again, where Dad was on the phone.
Okay, maybe he just wanted to score more points, but he radiated this weird casual energy that made me want to talk to him. I needed to talk to someone. Deep breath. “I fucked up worse than I have ever fucked up in my life.” I waited to see how he reacted to the f-bombs. Not at all.
He waited for me to talk, which I’d thought was my super power.
I wrapped the towel around my shoulders. “So I have these new friends who are better than any friends I’ve ever had except for Dad.” Once I started, the waters kept rolling down the pipe as I told him what had happened at the studio.
“Wow.” He saluted me with the glass when I finished. “You’re like a supervillain.”
“Dude.” I dropped into a chair. “You kinda lost a few of those points with that one.” Okay, yeah, I’d said the same thing, but that was totally different.
“We all do stupid stuff.” The glass drifted to his chest. “I do.” He waved it at the house. “Your dad? I could tell you stories about him.”
He had my undivided attention. “Okay. Let’s go with stories about Dad.”
Another sip. “You know we were friends in high school, right?”
I nodded.
“We were best friends for a few years. Inseparable.” He sipped again. “Then we both realized we weren’t like the other boys, but we didn’t know how the other felt and things got. . . awkward.”
Dad had never told me this story. I thought I knew everything.
“I figured out the whole gay thing before he did.” Mike chuckled. “Your dad was a little slow on the uptake about certain things.” He stared at me for a second, as if deciding how to proceed. “So one day I kissed him. We were in the locker room, and I thought we were alone.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Indeed. He kissed me back and don’t worry, I’m not going someplace gross. We heard someone shout, ‘Holy shit,’ behind us. He pushed me away and popped me in the mouth.”
“Holy shit!”
Mike chuckled. “Yeah. Not his finest moment.”
“No wonder I never heard this story.”
He swirled the ice. “I’m not surprised.” He looked at me. “So I was the queer one and he was just a guy I was queer for. This was all B-WAG, of course.”
“Okay sure, times were different and all that, but, holy shit, what a douchebag. What did he do to make it right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re here in his lounge chair with a cocktail,” I explained. “So he must have found a way to make it right.”
Mike chuckled. “Well, I found out this week that he did keep the other guys from beating the crap out of me for hitting on him.”
“But he apologized at least, right?”
He shook his head. “We didn’t speak again until he spotted me in the Starbucks.”
“But. . . but that’s not my dad. He’s all about personal responsibility. What a hypocrite.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because he popped his best friend and outed him and didn’t even take the time to say he was sorry.” I pulled the towel from around my shoulders and twisted it. “So what did you do when you saw him in Starbucks?”
“Well, I was buying a latte and as I reached for my wallet, this big arm reached around me and dropped a twenty on the counter. It was your dad. He’d gotten so big over the years.” Okay, the smile on Mike’s face was a little creepy because it was my dad he was smiling about. “He said, ‘I know this doesn’t really do anything, Mike, but it’s the only way I can think of to apologize for acting like a supervillain.’”
“Seriously? He said ‘supervillain’?”
Mike nodded. “You and your dad are a lot alike.” His face changed, became wistful, which isn’t a word I’d have thought I’d use. “Both your dads.”
“You knew my. . . my biological father?”
“We all grew up together.”
He lapsed into silence.
“So what made you accept his apology after all those years?”
“Time.” He answered quickly, as if he’d thought about it a lot already. “You hang out with adults, Ethan. That should give you a little more perspective than most folks your age. What happened was twenty years ago. Since then, I’ve done plenty of shitty things to other people way worse than panicking in a tight spot. If I held that one mistake against him, it’d make me a hypocrite.”
He lowered his voice. “The thing is, your dad did what he did. It didn’t make him a supervillain. If he’d have talked to me the next d
ay, I’d have forgiven him. I wouldn’t let years of friendship go down the drain for one stupid day.”
“I’ve only known my friends two weeks.”
“And a year from now, none of you will even remember this fight.” He rose from the chair. “Beating yourself up and calling yourself a supervillain doesn’t actually help the friends you hurt.” He walked toward the house.
“Hey, Mike.”
He stopped.
“What do you do for a living?”
He didn’t answer.
“Psychiatrist or Psychologist?” I asked.
He acknowledged my guess with a nod. “Psychologist.” He tossed the ice onto the grass. “I’ll tell your dad I gave up that story. I think I know him well enough to say he’s fine with anything I tell you as long as I’m trying to help.”
“Mike? Is Auntie Mac around?”
He turned to me with question marks in his face. “No.”
“Okay.” I kicked off my shoes. “I was gonna swim for awhile, and she gets weird if anyone’s out here without a suit.”
He barked a laugh. “You are your father’s son. If your dad and I want to sit outside, we’ll hit the front porch. The pool’s all yours.”
Cool. He got my hint. “Thanks. And Mike? For the record, you can have a coupla bonus points.”
He waved the glass above his head as he walked away.