Page 4 of Jealous Guy

I nodded, slightly slack-jawed, and after a quick deliberation, made the decision not to tell him I hadn’t kissed a girl yet. “Wow, er, thanks, man. I’ll bear that in mind.”

From there, we headed to the cafeteria, where a lunch worker rolled her eyes and threatened to report Jordan to the principal, all while biting back a smile and handing over the pudding he asked for.

It was incredible. It wasn’t even nine a.m., and there I was, having a school tour that didn’t suck and eating pudding instead of being in class. It was so unexpected that I found myself thinking that my mom might be right. Maybe living in Cape Elizabeth wouldn’t be the worst form of torture imaginable.

Once we’d finished our pudding, Jordan took me to a shadowy corridor near the science lab—apparently also a good make-out spot in a pinch—and then across the football field to the old bleachers.

“Now, the old bleachers are not to be confused with the new bleachers,” he explained. “The new bleachers offer no cover whatsoever. I got detention twice thinking Whitfield couldn’t see what I was doing behind them. But the old bleachers? Mmph, they’re golden.”

I bobbed my head to give him the impression I was absorbing the information and filing it away for safekeeping.

He hung a left before we got back to Mr. Whitfield’s class, steering me down the hallway until we came to a dead end. A door tucked away to one side had a small white-and-blue sign on it.

“Last thing,” he said, gesturing to it. His expression was somber and uncharacteristically serious. “This is the only boys’ restroom on campus that always has paper, so if you need to take a dump, make sure you take it here.”

“I, er, thanks, but I’m a nervous pooper, so the chance of me taking a dump anywhere other than my own home is literally less than zero,” I told him for no reason whatsoever.

Before the words had fully left my mouth, I was flooded with a chilling sense of certainty: I’d be reliving the horror of that moment for weeks to come. Weeks. Maybe months.

I’m a nervous pooper? Oh Jesus. It was going to be years.

As I prepared for my descent into an epic spiral of self-loathing, Jordan’s face morphed in front of me. The corners of his mouth hitched up, the right side a little more than the left. Shards of light bounced off his teeth and his eyes slid shut. His laughter bubbled out of him like something that cost nothing. A frothy, soft sound crashed into me like a solid brick wall. A brick wall that melted and spilled down my chest.

If I’d known myself better at the time, I’d have seen the writing on the wall. I’d have known what my reaction meant. But I was fourteen and dumber than a box of rocks, so I had no idea I wasn’t completely straight. Or straight at all.

Okay, okay, fine, I might have had a slight inkling that something about me was different. I didn’t have the words to describe it, though, or the inclination to try and define it. All I had were the bare bones of a concept I’d spent a lot of time trying not to think about. A cloak of confusion that wrapped tightly around me in the men’s underwear section in Macy’s. An uncomfortable heat that glowed beneath my cheeks in the boys’ locker room and made it hard for me to know where to look. A blanket of shame that got heavy sometimes late at night. So heavy that I’d toss and turn, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t kick it off.

“Orion Brent.” Jordan grinned when he spoke and dipped his head thoughtfully, as though he were going to say something of great significance. His lips and tongue moved in a way that looked controlled. Almost careful. Almost as though he were tasting the vowels and swallowing the consonants. “I like you.”

The words seemed to take a longer time than usual to land, and I heard them differently from the way I usually heard things. Not in my ears or my brain. I didn’t hear them at all, really. I felt them. In my face. In my lips. In my throat, and all the way down to my knees.

Despite the tour being a lot better than I expected, Jordan and I went our separate ways after homeroom, and my mood quickly plummeted. It turned out that I was dead right when I said moving to Cape Elizabeth would be torture. It was exactly as bad as I thought it would be, maybe worse. I got lost trying to find my way to the science lab and accidentally ended up back at the supply closet. I was late for class by the time I finally got there, so I was nonconsensually assigned a seat in the front row. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I was made to pair up for group work—an activity I despised on a good day—with a kid called Mark Dwyer. He had a habit of breathing through his mouth and a large ink stain on his lip from chewing his pen.

I could tell within minutes that he was the definition of a stage-five clinger.

After spending two whole periods together, I knew my fate was sealed. Mark was attached to me, and there was no way I’d be able to phase myself out of his life. At least not without actually telling him I was doing it.

God. I hated being new.

I hated not knowing anyone, and I hated not knowing where everything was. I hated the unfamiliar sounds and smells of a new school. I hated feeling turned around and even more uncomfortable in my own skin than usual—which, by the way, was already plenty uncomfortable.

When the lunch bell finally rang, I trudged to the cafeteria with Mark at my side. I didn’t want to sit with him, but I also didn’t want to sit alone. There were few things sadder than being new and sitting by yourself at lunch. I wasn’t sure whether sitting with Mark was one of those things.

As it turned out, I didn’t get a say in the matter. Mark grabbed a tray for me when we got to the front of the line and practically glued himself to me as we got our food.

The rigors of the day had started to get to me by then, and I didn’t have it in me to shake him, so I followed him to a table in the far corner of the room and found a seat. I chose a spot on the side of the table that allowed me to turn my back to most of the people in the room, hoping it would limit some of the damage.

I ate my shitty cafeteria meal with aversion, queasy from a combination of nerves and a major sugar crash. My jaw worked overtime, champing dried-out tater tots as I tried to work out how to make them go down without gagging. All the while, Mark sat silently and watched me eat.

My will to live was waning at a rapid rate. The roar of chairs being dragged over the floor, people talking, and the persistent clatter of cutlery on crockery were making me lightheaded. As I ate, I mentally rehearsed a strongly worded argument in favor of homeschooling. My mom was against it on principle. She said socialization was one of the most important things kids learn at school, and she didn’t believe I’d leave the house enough to socialize adequately if left to my own devices. In the lead-up to the move, she’d made her position on the matter abundantly clear. However, sitting there in the din of the cafeteria, I felt a flicker of optimism that by the time she heard the impassioned plea of my latest argument—I’m not going back there, and you can’t make me—she would see reason.

A firm tap on my shoulder jolted me out of it, making me jump. My head swiveled around accusingly to see who had touched me, and I found my nose almost touching a belt buckle. I blinked, and a denim fly with a very distinctive bulge under it came into focus.

The sight threw me, and so did what happened next.

“Whatcha doin’ over here, bud?” Jordan spoke in a ridiculous sing-song tone that made me smile way bigger than the situation called for. He gestured to Mark. “Why are you sitting with him? I thought you were gonna sit with me?”

I replied without thinking. My mouth moved and so did my tongue. The rest of me waited, half-curious, half-anxious, to find out what I was going to say.